


Wake the Dreamers

by vibrantsilences



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Dark Rey (Star Wars), F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post-Canon Fix-It, Sexy Times, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, Time Travel Fix-It, blatant disregard for canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:41:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 31,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22044250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vibrantsilences/pseuds/vibrantsilences
Summary: *** THIS SUMMARY CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR STAR WARS EPISODE IX: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER; PLEASE BE GUIDED ACCORDINGLY! ***A year after the Battle of Exegol, the Resistance have begun requesting that Rey train a new generation of Jedi apprentices. Rey does not want to admit that she is afraid to take up this mantle, or that she has poured her power into preserving a memory of Ben Solo's sacrifice on Exegol, in hopes that she can somehow manipulate these events to bring him back.When Rey learns that Ben is trapped in the World Between Worlds, and that his time is running out, she sets out in search of a Jedi holocron that contains the secret of his whereabouts. As Rey fights both her doubts and an increasing pull to the Dark, she finds that hope can be a double-edged sword.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Reylo
Comments: 24
Kudos: 67





	1. Prologue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey clings to a dream of the past, which has become her waking obsession.

**PROLOGUE**

_ “People with dark souls have nothing but dark dreams. People with really dark souls do nothing but dream.” - Haruki Murukami _

_ “You’re so lonely. So afraid to leave. At night, desperate to sleep...you imagine an ocean. I see it...I see the island.” - Kylo Ren, The Force Awakens _

  
  
  


The island only comes to her at night, as it has always done.

It is at once dream, vision, and waking reality. It is alone in a vast ocean, all stars obscured by a covering of clouds. Rey seems to view it from above, though she is present in the moment, too, walking towards the distant temple as thunder rolls in the distance.

It has always been an island, though its outline has changed. The one is a rocky refuge adrift in a lonely sea, the other a dark world lost in endless space. Later she will see they were always one, but it can be difficult to pinpoint these moments that change everything until they are gone. 

For now, she knows the path she must take.

The air is electric with an imminent storm, lightning outlining the outcroppings, the jagged silhouette of the Sith temple. She walks toward it, steeling herself for what is to come: the confrontation of an ancient enemy. The temptation to the dark. The ensuing battle.

In her subsequent study of the Jedi texts, Rey learns that there are those who believe a moment can be altered with enough focus in the Force; enough concentration to bend time around that moment. But Rey’s intention is not to alter what comes before, terrible as it is.

She tells herself that she would relive this destruction a thousand times if there is any chance she can bring Ben back. And barring that, she would relive it all again just to be in his arms again, to see him smile…

And relive it, she does.

Behind her, the Knights of Ren lie defeated in the antechamber. Palpatine has been routed. Luke’s saber lies extinguished on the floor; Leia’s is not far from it. She has given everything, but she has taken something too: an anchor to this moment, a place of return. It is this last moment she wants to return to, draw out, examine from every angle.

The world fades to darkness, but not the perverted kind this time. It is a peaceful nothingness into which she dissipates. She releases and descends.

The waiting is like holding her breath, like drowning.

And then her eyes blink open and he is gathering her up in his arms, holding her, cradling her head in his hands. 

“Ben!”

Her disbelief gives way to joy _.  _ She collapses into him. Tears, blood, and dirt are mingled on his face - that beautiful face! She is kissing him in an instant, drawing him to her, afraid to let him go. She wills herself to believe that this time can be different.

And he is kissing her back.

He smiles and her world breaks open. Those deep brown eyes have always been haunted, full of war, but in this moment there is nothing but peace, and a daring to  _ hope _ .

A thousand possible futures emanate from this moment, which is why she has anchored herself here.

She holds him, warm and solid under her scraped hands, as if he might disappear, afraid he’ll become a phantom again, because…well, this isn’t the first time Ben Solo has brought her back from the dead.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to my first attempt at a Star Wars fic! If you're here, thanks so much for reading! This prologue is basically a slight elaboration on the teaser in the description, but the subsequent chapters will be a little meatier. 
> 
> The mention of bending time is a reference to the [Aing-Tii](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Aing-Tii) practice of [flow-walking](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Flow-walkingflow-walking). I'm including a pretty broad mix of canon and Legends material in this fic, and have just decided to blend them into a single narrative for my purposes.


	2. Chapter One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Rey struggles with pressures of being the only remaining Jedi, rumors of a dark enemy rise from distant reaches of the galxy. Rey keeps a secret from her friends, and makes an unexpected encounter.
> 
> ***
> 
> Welcome to the first true chapter of this fic, which is a wild mix of canon, legends, and my own weird imaginings, which are beginning to sprawl into a longer work. Hope you enjoy!

**Chapter One**

  
  


_ “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.” - Yoda, Attack of the Clones _

  
  


And still, every time it seems that reconciliation is within reach, it vanishes. The throne room, Ben, the whole of that dark world...all of it.

And worse, Rey wakes to find herself moving through her waking life with a kind of resignation that feels alien to her, like all the fight has gone out of her. She huddles in her bunk on Ajan Kloss, holding the stone in her open palm, letting its cool green light wash over her face. She closes her hand over it, feeling it warm and solid in her fingers.

Like it’s the last thing she has left of him.

“Be with me,” she whispers, before extinguishing it, letting the dark wash over her again.

Rey didn’t mean to create the memory crystal. Not exactly.

She wonders what her friends would say if they knew what she has done - imbuing a crystal with the memory of Exegol, because in its dark heart, it carries the seed of her dearest hope:  _ someone who could still return _ .

The months since her defeat of the dark Emperor have been heavy ones for Rey. It has been nearly a year since the Resistance returned to Ajan Kloss to celebrate their victory against Palpatine, to regroup, and to imagine a new future in a galaxy rid of their darkest enemy.

There had been an adrenaline in the air throughout the base in those first weeks the Resistance fighters had returned to celebrate their victory, regroup, and imagine a new future in a galaxy rid of their darkest enemy. Energy like the electricity of lightning in a spring storm crackled throughout the camp, and an overwhelming sense of relief hung over the place, almost palpable.

Rey should have been at the center of it all, radiant, victorious.

Instead, she has retreated within herself. She is happy for the pilots who returned, of course. Happy to see her friends. But the exuberance of those first days burns away like mist over a moisture farm, and the harsh lines of reality emerge.

The fighters who joined Rey on Exegol hail her as a hero, though she can hardly bear the term. Every round of Adumari beer passed her way in the mess hall as the survivors gather to recount battle stories reminds her of those who will never return. They look at her with a kind of reverence she doesn’t feel she deserves. 

And Ben.

It hurts to think of him. She has never once begrudged him his sacrifice - how could she wish to take back the defeat of the darkest enemy in the Resistance’s memory? But she is, at the same time, stubbornly angry. How could he have brought her back only to abandon her, leaving her only half herself? 

Her friends do their best to comfort her, to honor the bond she shared with Ben, and consequently the loss she feels now, but there is only so far their empathy extends. They don’t know him like she does, and unfortunately the atrocities they associate with Kylo Ren are real actions Ben is responsible for - with or without his mask.

Rey doesn’t want to admit that she has spent every day hoping she will hear from him again; that at some unexpected moment the force bond will be activated, and there he’ll be - crashing into her thoughts, her space, in that brash, fumbling way of his - somehow clumsy and zealous at the same time.

But there has been only silence.

At first, upon her return from Exegol, she had thrown herself into any task that would serve the Resistance cause. She wanted to do anything she could for those who had risked their lives to help her defeat the Emperor and his diabolic fleet. This had included delving into the Jedi scriptures with an urgency she hadn’t known before - an urge to know everything she could to increase her power - to become the hero that every pilot and fighter who had returned from Exegol thought she was. She spent hours running training courses until she collapsed into her bunk at night, and then she spent more time meditating on what she had learned, what she could discern from tapping into the Force. She thought that maybe the looks of her compatriots would become easier to bear if she could prove them right.

The one thing she had not yet done was to craft her own saber.

She tells herself it was because she hasn’t yet decided on the construction. Meditating over the crystal that forms the blade is a lengthy and intense process unique to each Jedi Knight. The texts detail the process for doing so, and Rey had studied each of the steps.

But yet, she cannot bring herself to finish it. She knows that with that honor comes a duty to the galaxy, and more so, a resignation to her current reality. She is still a padawan without a master, but in the position of being the most educated master - without a trainee of her own. Both Luke and Leia’s sabers have served their purposes, but Rey feels that constructing her own will signal the end of her training. It is only a matter of time until she decides how to proceed - early in her training with Leia, the General had gifted Rey a piece of kyber crystal, which the texts indicated she should keep with her as she spent time contemplating her path in the Force.

Rey had held the colorless crystal in her hand night after night as she meditates.

At first it is easy to clear her mind of all attachments. Upon her return to the Resistance base, she wanted nothing more than to forget the horrors of the Sith temple, and the loss and pain she had felt there. She focused her attention on the force flowing in her, in other beings, between them, binding them all together.

But she finds that as she sits in her bunk night after night, her mind strays back to the moment on Exegol her eyes had fluttered open; the moment she realized how great Ben’s sacrifice was, and how truly he had changed.

And those eyes - that smile.

She could live forever in that smile. Certainly no Jedi who had ever felt the Light flow through them could deny the joy and selflessness that radiated from it. The way Rey pictured it as she gripped the crystal in her palm became vivid, as if she were there in the Sith temple again, but not facing an ancient enemy - feeling the hope of a thousand generations transferred into her being.

The crystal takes on a greenish hue that deepens each night she returns to the memory. She barely closes her eyes before she feels Ben’s arms around her, strong and sure.

When she first returned to Ajan Kloss, Rey thought with time she could move past the grief of waking up to the reality that Ben was gone. But as the days wear on, she finds herself leaving the table early, neglecting her training runs, returning to her bunk every chance she gets, to grip the crystal in her hand and be with him again.

The scriptures caution against putting too much stock in visions and dreams, as they tend to represent attachments - things or people the Jedi might be afraid to lose. This attachment could create cracks where fear and doubt might work their way into a serene mind, stirring doubt. There are times that the cautions of the great Jedi Masters come to her, but she brushes them off. The vision is a sign, she decides, that this moment is a branch in her path, a stone around which the waters of time flow for her.

And somehow, this helps to ease the pain of her grief.

While everyone around her seems eager to celebrate the demise of the monster they knew as Kylo Ren, she still mourns Ben - the one who sacrificed everything for her. The one who understands her in a way none of them do.

The Force has always allowed her to discern the shape of the future, when she wants to see it. It is never clear, and never sure - there are always choices that can be made to shape it into something else.

This is what gives her hope.

If time can be glimpsed in the future, why can’t the past also be mutable? Why can’t the ripples of an important moment run backwards, too? It doesn’t make sense to her yet, but if she can keep this moment close, perhaps someday she can find a way to return to it, to make things right.

Until then, if dreams are the closest she will get to second chances, dreams will be just fine.

  
  


***

  
  


Finn catches Rey at her workbench, immersed in one of the Jedi texts.

There are half a dozen electronic parts lying in various stages of disassembly across the bench, and she has cleared a space to read.

“Good to see you brushing up,” he says brightly, pulling out a stool and taking a seat next to her.

Rey jumps, her concentration breaking.

“I was just looking into new Force healing techniques,” she lies, closing the book. She  _ has  _ become something of a medic around the base since discovering her Force healing abilities, but there is only one thing she has been searching for in the texts since Exegol: a way to bring Ben back.

She can’t explain her certainty that he’s still out there,  _ somewhere.  _ It’s more of a feeling than anything, but the Jedi are always telling one another to search their feelings. It can’t be  _ nothing.  _ And the texts certainly aren’t nothing either - though they are filled with metaphor and dead languages that must be translated in a reductive way, there are sparks of hope scattered through.

Rey just has to make sense of them.

The thought to ask Luke or Leia through the Force has crossed her mind, but the few times they have appeared to her since Exegol, they’ve prodded her about other things - mostly her future in the Jedi order. They don’t want to rehash the past.

Lately, Rey mostly shuts them out.

“Busy?” Finn asks, parking himself on a stool next to her.

“I’m free,” she says, flashing him the most genuine smile she can muster. “Shoot.”

“You know that Jannah, Rose, and I have been scouting the Outer Rim, looking for refugees we can help since the battle. There are a lot of people who have been freed and now don’t know what to do. We’re trying to help where we can.”

Rey nods. Finn, Poe, and Rose have taken leadership positions within the Resistance, but none of them are born generals. This isn’t something any of them wanted. Still, there are people who need their help, and they have stepped into the required roles.

She can’t say the same for herself.

She wants nothing more than to retreat, silencing the voices in her head telling her the Jedi order depends on her. Something tells her this has everything to do with what Finn is about to ask.

“We’re planning to do a rescue run to Cantonica,” he says, and Rey can already tell he’s circling around something he’s not saying outright, guarding his speech. Searching her reactions.

“Going back to Canto Bight?” she asks, brown wrinkling. “Why there?”

Finn nods. “That entire place is full of slavers, war criminals, people profiting off the weapons industry. Now that the First Order has been destroyed, there’s a power vacuum. We know there is a lot of support for the Resistance among the slaves and laborers that are being held there. We’re going in to get as many people as we can out of there.” His jaw is set, his expression grim.

“The children from the racetrack,” Rey says, nodding. “I remember you said there were a lot of them.”

“Ajan Kloss is a small planet but we’re going to try to help as many children as we can. The furthest reaches of the Outer Rim is going to be a dangerous place for anyone who sympathizes with us. There are already rumors of a shadow growing in the furthest reaches of the galaxy.”

“Already?” Rey’s breath catches, but there’s a part of her that’s not surprised. It is only a matter of time - the force will seek balance. But she hadn’t imagined it would come so soon.

“Rey, the Jedi are legends to these kids,” Finn says. “It’s what brought them enough strength to help Rose and I when we were there, even though it was dangerous for them. They need someone new to look up to. And some of them need a teacher.” 

Rey’s expression clouds and she shakes her head. “I’m not ready.”

“Rey, it’s been almost a year,” he says gravely. “You’re the only one who knows these techniques in any real way, and some of them are feeling the same awakening you did.”

Fear constricts Rey’s voice. “I haven’t even completed my own training. I still haven’t even constructed a lightsaber of my own.”

“You know a lightsaber isn’t what makes a Jedi,” Finn retorts. “And I don’t understand why you keep belittling yourself. You defeated  _ Palpatine! _ ” 

Rey shakes her head. “It’s too dangerous. I...I’ve been having dreams. Dreams that I still fall to the Dark.” Her voice is a whisper now.

“You don’t believe that,” Finn says stubbornly. “You’re not yourself! And we don’t have time for you not to be. We’re all worried about you. You’ve been a kind of zombie for a while now. And we...well, we thought it would be good if you had a job to do. We’re afraid we’re losing you, Rey. I know things feel a bit strange right now, but you have to find a way to be  _ here. _ ”

Rey’s temper flares.

“You don’t know what you’re asking!” She says it louder than she means to, but she is practically shaking. “You have no idea what’s going on inside of me - it would be a disaster!”

The one thing she has been grateful for is that her closest friends see her for who she truly is since returning from Exegol. Finn, Poe, and Rose have all acknowledged her grief and brokenness, allowed her to be a human. While others have looked at her as a hero, they have looked at her as a friend - not the savior. Not the Jedi.

_ Not the Sith. _

But that is changing now. The thought still plagues her. What will rise to fill the vacuum that Palpatine and his devotees left behind? One thing is certain - his blood runs in her veins.

What if the darkness that rises to replace him comes from within her?

“You’re stronger than that,” Finn says, sensing her doubt.

“But I’m not!” Rey shouts back. “I faced him... _ and it killed me.  _ Then my equal sacrificed himself for me, and it killed him, too. Everything I touch  _ dies _ . I couldn’t possibly take this on, not now. All those defenseless younglings? I couldn’t...I couldn’t.”

Tears are threatening at the corners of her eyes, and she shakes her head vehemently. Finn looks at her with a disappointment that is almost worse than anger.

“You’re waiting for someone who’s never coming back for you,” he says, rising from the bench. “Just like Jakku. You have a way of holding onto memories that keep you stuck in a lie. If you don’t find a way to let him go, it’s going to hurt a lot more people than just you.”

“That’s not fair,” Rey says, her throat constricting. She rises and  _ runs  _ from the flight deck. The tears are flowing now, and she doesn’t have the words to tell Finn how wrong he is.

_ And how right. _

Maybe a day will come when she accepts that she is the last of the Jedi order, and that its future is up to her. But it’s not today.

She runs blindly through the undergrowth past the mess hall into the dormitory. She runs down the hall, finds the door to her cell, flings it open…

...and runs  _ smack  _ into Ben Solo - tall, solid, and completely alive.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By way of introduction:
> 
> This is my first foray into Star Wars fanfiction, and I'm playing pretty fast and loose with canon lore. My main sources are the sequel trilogy movies, Wookieepedia, and the Rise of Skywalker Visual Dictionary, but I'm apt to take some pretty serious liberties with combining canon and legends lore in service of bringing our star-crossed force dyad back together again :) I'll make an effort to link to concepts and objects as they become relevant.
> 
> I have a general outline for the story, but no set posting schedule. I'll do my best to post regularly - early chapters may go up pretty fast, but once I'm back to my post-holidays work schedule a chapter every couple of weeks is more likely.
> 
> That's about it - enjoy this attempt to drown my sorrows post-TROS! 
> 
> [Ajan Kloss](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Ajan_Kloss)
> 
> [Memory crystal](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Memory_crystal)
> 
> [Lightsabers](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Lightsaber/Legends)
> 
> [Kyber crystal](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Kyber_crystal)
> 
> [Canto Bight](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Canto_Bight)
> 
> [Sacred Jedi texts](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Jedi_texts)


	3. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A cryptic visit from Ben confronts Rey with both hope and riddles. The question of Rey's future in the Jedi order continues to haunt her.

**Chapter Two**

  
  


“Ben?”

She looks up at him, all questions, unwilling to believe her eyes - believe her whole  _ body.  _ She has run full-tilt into him, and still all she can think of are the countless visions that have dissolved before her over the past year. This is no vision.

“What are you do-”

But he grabs her faster than she can speak, practically lifting her off the floor in those arms of his, and he is  _ kissing  _ her like his life depends on it - like he needs her for air.

And she wastes no time testing her conviction, proving to herself how real he is. She is done with the ghosts of him that have left her nightly for the past year.

She leans into the kiss with her whole self, and when she has finished with that, she kisses him again. She traces his chest with her hand, and he traces her spine, his fingers a question mark on her skin. He runs his other hand through her hair, pulling her towards him. She lets her fingers trail towards the edges of his cowl, lets them creep beneath…

Until suddenly, he pulls back. He shakes the hair from his eyes, draws his first deep breath since crashing into her. He is all flushed cheeks and wild eyes, and he doesn’t know how to say what comes next, so Rey speaks for both of them.

“I thought you were dead,” she whispers.

The corners of his mouth turn down and his eyes cloud. Several expressions pass across his face before he speaks. Rey’s breath catches in her throat, and she’s suddenly afraid of what he’s about to say.

“Not dead...exactly,” he says, his fingers tracing her sleeve awkwardly before falling to his side. “But also, not alive.”

_ No, no, no! _

“But you’re here,” Rey flinches, hope wilting on her tongue. Tears spring into her eyes and she steps back, shaking her head. This can’t be happening again. “You’re here.”

“Not for long,” he says, and it is a wound and an apology all at once. There is so much light in his dark eyes - more than Rey has ever seen. And yet she is afraid to ask what illuminates them. Something smolders there and she cannot tell if it is anger, or frustration, or grief, but she recognizes all of them as the same ghosts peering out from her own eyes. “I’ve already used up too much time. It’s taken everything I have to project myself here - I don’t know how long it will last. I can’t always use the Force where I am; I can’t speak with you like I used to.”

So this is why he’s been so silent. Rey is momentarily relieved to hear that his absence hasn’t been by choice. She has been right to think he was out there, somewhere. She should feel some kind of relief, but all she wants to do is scream, cry. She wants to push at him, to tell him how exactly he is fulfilling every nightmare that ends with him fading away. How can he appear, bringing hope that she’s been wrong, only to pull it away from her again? Has he returned only to say goodbye?

“I don’t understand,” she says in a strangled whisper.

“I can’t explain it,” he says, jaw clenching in frustration. “Something happened to me in the throne room on Exegol after you d...after I brought you back.”

“After you disappeared.”

He grits his teeth and nods. “I thought I  _ had  _ died, but then I opened my eyes and I was...somewhere else.”

“Somewhere else?”

“I’m stuck in some kind of netherworld, Rey. I could tell I was going somewhere when I left the throne room - wherever it is the dead go. But I never really...arrived.”

He fumbles with his hands, with his words. Rey can tell it frustrates him to be so unable to communicate what has happened. The bond between them had let them slip into each other’s thoughts and feelings to the degree that they hadn’t needed words to communicate. But now that he is somewhere the bond can’t reach, words are all he has, clumsy and incomplete.

“I sensed my mother, but she wasn’t there,” he continues. “No one was there. Or... _ here,  _ I guess. I’m still caught in this place, like some kind of  _ limbo _ ...” The words cut from his lips, bitter, and he whirls away from her.

Rey steps forward, places a hand on his shoulder. When he turns, there are tears in his eyes, and she is caught off guard. She has only seen him cry once before, in Snoke’s throne room after they had turned their intentions towards each other for the first time to defeat a common enemy. That discussion had ended in parting, too. A lump grows in her throat. She would rather see him angry if it means he has a plan, that he’s resisting the trap he’s in. 

His chin quivers, and once again he’s the broken little boy with ghosts in his head. “I didn’t want to give up waiting for you,” he says.

Rey shakes her head, tears pooling in her own eyes. “If I knew how to find you, I would! If there’s a way to you, just tell me.”

His brow wrinkles, and he looks at her, bewildered. “Ahh,” he says finally. “I’m beginning to think that time works a little differently here. I didn’t think about the possibility that you don’t already know.”

“Know what?” Rey asks, but his eyes tell her he is somewhere else, and she begins to doubt the solidity of his presence. 

“That everything is going to be alright,” he says, and a smile breaks through his tears like sun through clouds. She wants to melt into it, to forget everything else that is occurring. But he’s not done. “At least I hope it will. I feel like I’m really fading now, and you...you haven’t even left this planet yet. I think that once I leave this place, whatever it is, I’ll really be gone,” he says, his voice cracking. A question hangs between them, but he doesn’t know how to ask it. After everything, he feels it would be wrong; that it might be like taking back his gift. 

Rey understands his hesitation, and disregards it in the same heartbeat. “If there’s a way to find you, just tell me what to do!”

He hesitates, and a shadow crosses his face. 

“You know something you’re keeping from me,” Rey insists. “This is no time for secrets.” She takes his hand in both of hers, and looks up at him, wills him to be there with her. “Tell me, please!” For the first time in months, there is a fire in her eyes. She is so tired of waiting.

He looks at her then and sees her, really sees her. He slips his hand away, into a satchel at his waist, and then reaches out to Rey. She thinks he is about to embrace her again, but instead, he takes her hand and places something cold and heavy in it. 

Rey opens her palm - and recoils as she registers what he’s handed her: the Sith wayfinder that marked the way to Exegol. 

“Please tell me I don’t have to go back,” she whispers. Her stomach turns at the presence of the compass that led her to that dark world. What could be left of it, anyway? It is one thing to walk the halls of the Sith temple in a dream. It is another thing to be asked to return. It sits there in her hand like a dead thing.

Ben shakes his head. “There is another portal.”

“A door to where you are?” Something tickles the back of Rey’s mind. She has searched the Jedi texts with just such a hope, but if she had come across the mention of a portal, she had not understood.

He nods. “Beneath the Sith temple there’s a kind of door to this place where I am. You’ve used it before.”

Rey’s mind races. Certainly she would remember something so significant? “When did I do this?” 

“I don’t know,” Ben says, frustrated again. “But you did. When I fell through the cracks in the floor before you killed the Emperor, I saw it. And I saw  _ you _ . Not in the throne room, but in the pit beneath. I saw a vision of our future. Together.”

Rey shudders. She has seen their future, too, shrouded in power and blood. She has regarded these visions as temptations to be feared or at the very least disregarded, and she knows Ben has seen them too. Is that what she will have to accept if he is to return?

But Ben shakes his head. “That throne is gone,” he says, reading her fear. For a moment hope soars in her - once again they are in tune. “But Rey...that’s not the only time you’ve come to me.”

He  _ fades  _ then, for a second, flashes in and out of being, and Rey steps back, alarmed. He is standing there again, but his outline has begun to blur - a mere hologram of the man she knows. She reaches out for him, but her hand passes through his.

“Don’t leave me,” she says, panic rising in her throat. She doesn’t have nearly enough information to figure out where he might be, how she might reach him.

He smiles then. “It’s going to be alright,” he says, and takes her chin in his hands. His touch is like a breath; a suggestion.

“How do you know?” Rey asks, her voice breaking.

“You’ve told me how this ends,” he says, and before the sound has even left his lips, he is gone. Once again the room is quiet, and Rey is alone.

  
  


***

  
  


Rey stares at the space where he stood, hoping against hope that he will flash back into frame, but he doesn’t. She can still feel the impression of him, memories scrawled across her skin like tally marks etched into the wall of her bedroom back on Jakku.

She is done waiting.

The wayfinder is still there in her hand. She wants to smash it against the ground the way Ben had smashed his on Kef Bir. She wants nothing more than to channel some of his intensity now, to help her muster courage she doesn’t feel. He had told her the only way she would get to Exegol was with him, and he was right. 

Rey tucks the wayfinder away in her bag and heads to the door, eager to return to the Jedi texts with new eyes, looking for things she has missed before. The inscriptions, when she can decipher them with her datapad, are often cryptic, but they’re the best she has.

She heads out of the dormitory, back past the mess hall to the flight deck, where a transport is landing, flight crew directing it into the hangar as its propellers create a tiny windstorm. Rey watches as the landing gear is deployed and the plane comes to a rest. Jannah is the first to disembark, followed by a squad of wide-eyed younglings.

_ So they were in Canto Bight already,  _ Rey realizes, watching Rose follow them off the ship and shepherd the younglings off to the mess hall to clean up and get some food. This wasn’t just a hypothetical Finn had brought up - the plan had already been in place. And now the Resistance were guardians for a group of children who have lost everything and need everything from them - food, shelter, a place to belong.  _ A teacher. _

The group passes Rey as she stands on the periphery of the landing pad; the texts are in her workbench, but she is suddenly apprehensive, the much more immediate question of her future surfacing in front of her yet again. 

As they walk by, the gaggle of children look up at her, whispering and pointing. There are a few human children, along with a young Twi’lek, an Ovissian, and a white-haired Caphex. Rey can’t help but smile when one of the girls shyly holds out the Rebel Alliance ring she’s been wearing, drawing back the shutter to reveal the Resistance emblem, gazing up at Rey in wonder.

_ If only you knew who I really am,  _ Rey sighs wistfully.  _ I’m not who you think. _

Finn has been waiting for the ship, and catches Rey’s eye across the flight deck. He nods to her meaningfully, and she forces a smile back, though her chest feels tight. As soon as he turns away, a frown wrinkles her brow. If he thinks she’s going to dive right in to the role of Jedi Master, he’ll have to wait. 

The Force will always be there, waiting to be grasped, but Ben doesn’t have much time.

Rey waits until the children have gone, until the flight deck is empty again. Then she climbs the stairs to her workbench, settles onto her stool, and pulls out the  _ Rammahgon,  _ heart hammering. The texts may be cryptic, but they’ve offered her invaluable guidance in the past.

If there’s ever been a time for hope, it is now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Force projection](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Force_projection)
> 
> [Wayfinder](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Wayfinder)
> 
> [Kef Bir](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Kef_Bir)
> 
> [Battle in Snoke's throne room](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Snoke%27s_throne_room)
> 
> [Twi'lek](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Twi%27lek)
> 
> [Ovissian](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Ovissian)
> 
> [Caphex](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Caphex)


	4. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey finds some unexpected guidance in the Jedi texts, and learns that finding Ben won't be as straightforward as she'd hoped. A dark premonition does nothing to assuage her fears about her future as a Jedi Master.

**Chapter Three**

  
  


The Jedi texts are more metaphor than manual, but from what Rey can discern initially, things do not look good.

The day has grown long, and twilight is falling over the flight deck, but Rey is still bent over the texts. She flips back and forth through the pages, jumping from one diagram to another, willing herself to see connections that she hopes are there. The texts are written in ancient languages that Rey can’t read, but she uses her datapad to translate.

From what she can gather, the place Ben described corresponds most closely to a plane that is the subject of the the Chain Worlds Theorem inked in detailed diagrams on the pages. The idea is that a place exists outside of space and time - a world between worlds. This place is accessible via portals - the door Ben described. Wayfinders would point the way towards these points of entry, and the lodestone - the crystal at the heart of the wayfinder - would act as a key, showing the user how the portal could be opened.

Rey’s problem is that she can’t seem to discern where other portals might be located. Exegol had contained one - Ben said so himself - but Rey couldn’t bring herself to believe it could have survived the destruction of the Sith Citadel.

Short of destroying Exegol in its entirety, the battle between the Resistance and the Final Order had left the planet in shambles, not to mention the fact that Rey’s final blow against Palpatine himself had brought the temple crashing down, filling the pit. Rey had used the Force to lift stones before, but the texts were clear - the portal itself had to be intact. There was next to no chance that anything within the temple remained where it had been before the battle, and even less of a chance that it hadn’t been shattered in the aftermath.

Rey’s shoulders slump.

_ It would be easier just to ask Master Luke,  _ a voice prodded in her head - perhaps the voice of her own better reason.

But she isn’t really sure Luke will understand what she is trying to do. After all, Luke had projected himself across the galaxy to fight his nephew on Crait, to challenge his stubborn hold on the Dark. Had Luke seen what had taken place in the Sith throne room? In the heat of the onslaught, had he noticed what Ben had become? Rey isn’t sure, and she doesn’t want to slow herself down with explanations now.

But a further exploration of the texts shows Rey that Luke may have already given her all the answers she needs.

“You may be onto something, Master,” she muses as her fingers trace the visualization of the Chain Worlds Theorem inked intricately on the  _ uneti  _ parchment of the  _ Rammahgon _ , alongside notes in Luke’s heavier scrawl.

There’s something familiar about the Chain Worlds image, and the way it spreads across the page like a spider’s web.

She flips through the pages of the  _ Rammahgon  _ until she finds the one depicting the wayfinder. There it is again - the same webbed diagram of the World Between Worlds. Below it Luke has pasted in a newer piece of parchment inscribed with his own map, complete with coordinates.

Rey holds her datapad over the page, waiting for the Galactic Basic translation to appear on the screen.

“Ach-to,” she breathes. Was Luke really trying to hide away from his destiny on the isolated island world, or had he been after something more? “What were you really looking for, Luke?” she breathes.

The image of the Sith wayfinder is inscribed in black ink on the next page, alongside a white etching of an identical wayfinder. Rey has always assumed that they are diagrams of the same wayfinder, juxtaposed to emphasize different elements of the design. After all, Luke had found Ach-to using a Jedi compass with its own central lodestone - one that looked nothing like the pyramidal Sith device.

But what if there is another wayfinder? Another map to another portal?

Rey examines the texts eagerly, holding her datapad over the pages. She already knows how to get to Ach-to, but the texts seem to indicate that the wayfinders are crucial to opening the portal. The lodestone in the Sith wayfinder won’t do; she’ll be able to reach the island, but even if she can find the portal, she won’t be able to open it.

She needs the Jedi holocron - the Light twin paired to the Dark wayfinder Ben had left with her. 

She peers at the rest of the markings on the page, and finds what she’s looking for: a location. Marked on the same page as the wayfinder inscriptions is a star chart indicating the coordinates of a waypoint marked “the Dark Archive.” Next to it is written “Takodana”.

There is also another note in Luke’s handwriting, which is neat, but in such a stylized script Rey nearly needs her datapad to decipher it.

It’s a warning:

_ The wayfinders lead to a world of unbeing, which has been traversed at great cost. The instability of the portal is of secondary danger to the illusions with which it tempts the traveler. Only those of singular mind in the Light may enter. _

Rey’s brow wrinkles. There  _ has  _ been one thing bothering her about this whole situation, but she hasn’t wanted to consider it until now:

What if the encounter she’d had with Ben has been an illusion, a trick of the Dark Side? What if he really  _ is  _ gone, and she’s being lured into a trap?

Though no one has given a concrete account, there have been whispers from the far reaches of the galaxy that an enemy has begun to rise from Palpatine’s shadow. The story has been repeated on Ajan Kloss countless times by those rescued from precarious power vacuums in the Outer Rim. There are as many versions of the story as there are worlds the Resistance had visited, but the message is always the same: a disturbance in the Force in the shape of a new enemy. 

Rey wants to brush the stories off, chalk it up to speculation, but she can feel it too.

She is sure that those who have any attunement with the Force can feel it. Sometimes she wakes at night from dreams she can’t remember, breathless and afraid. She is ashamed - she knows that a Jedi is supposed to shun fear by giving up attachments - that there should be nothing they are so afraid to lose. Despite her reluctance and uncertainty about whether this is something she wants for herself, she really has tried.

And she has seen the shape of her future.

These are the nights she clutches the memory crystal close to her, letting the green glow wash over her face, wading through the nightmare until she is safe in Ben’s arms, where she can drift off to sleep again. What could be wrong about holding someone like this, in memory or in person? Why is it so wrong to fear losing him? Is that not the eternal question of loving the living?

She realizes then that it’s barely up to her - If there is even so much as a chance that Ben is alive, she has to find him. There is so much unsaid between them; so much left unfinished. It is one thing to mourn someone who’s gone, but another to know you have a chance to save them, and do nothing. 

The sun has dipped below the horizon, and the jungle undergrowth surrounding the flight deck has created a premature twilight that deepens until Rey can no longer read the texts without the aid of a light. She realizes she’s  _ starving,  _ and also about to fall asleep at her workbench. It won’t do to set off now when she’s liable to make a questionable decision, starved for food or sleep. It nearly kills her to have to wait, but she can’t risk it. She will have to wait for morning.

Besides, she knows who can tell her where the holocron is.

Rey walks stiffly back to her quarters, the  _ Rammahgon  _ tucked under her arm. The mess hall is dark and quiet by now, and Rey produces a packet of rations from her bag, a holdover from her days on Jakku. The packets are the same on every world it seems, and she keeps a few with her for emergencies.

“I’ll be back for you, I promise,” she whispers, clutching her memory crystal, echoing words she once heard in a dream she once had on the world she’ll be setting off for tomorrow. She thinks about how time flows over words, steeping them in new meaning.

Rey has barely dragged herself into her cot before sleep takes her, dark and deep.

  
  


***

  
  


_ Golden sun slants through the palms as Rey leads the younglings through a meditation exercise. Her eyes are closed, but she reaches out to gauge their level of concentration. They are trying so hard, sitting there cross-legged on their mats, the image of attentive padawans, and yet their focus ranges from weak to practically absent as they fidget. They are so eager to feel the force flowing through them, to  _ see  _ what visions it might bring. When they are met with only silence and darkness, they grow weary. _

_ Rey recognizes in them the same impatience she had felt when she began her training with Luke on Ach-to. _

_ Each of these children is in a new place, she thinks, removed from any comforts or familiarity of their old world. They are young and have much to learn. Rey smiles - there will be time.  _

_ “Emotion, yet peace,” she councils them, and they repeat the phrase back to her in a chorus of fervent voices: “Emotion, yet peace.” _

_ “Ignorance, yet knowledge,” Rey continues, citing the version of the Jedi code taught to initaties during their initial training. They do not know the weight of these words yet, but they will come to know. _

_ The shadows on Ajan Kloss grow long. _

_ “Passion, yet serenity,” Rey recites, and the children repeat after her. She reaches for serenity in the Force within herself, sees the cosmic ocean that always appears before her eyes when she retreats into the silence of meditation. Or is it an ocean she has seen before? _

_ “Chaos, yet harmony.” _

_ The waves are roiling. Rey purses her lips and wrinkles her brow, letting the image of disturbance pass across her internal gaze, and dissipate again - an image detached from reality. It is not uncommon to absorb small disturbances from those nearby, especially those untrained in the Force. She has to balance this energy, infusing their bond with both serenity and harmony.  _

_ And yet, the disturbance persists… _

_ “Death, yet the Force,” she says, and she can sense something that she can’t hold back. _

_ Before the words have left her lips her world explodes. _

_ Something dark splits through Rey’s interior silence, jolting her out of her bond with the younglings. She is on her feet in seconds, lightsaber drawn and crackling. The back of her neck and hands prickle, and she scans the forest for signs of an enemy.  _

_ The children scream, stumbling backwards and pointing in horrified silence. _

_ Rey whirls, expecting some creature or enemy which she has not foreseen looming behind her, but there is nothing. _

How can this be?  _ She wonders in alarm, heart pounding. How could something have gotten so close, without any warning?  _ I should have sensed it.

_ But the younglings are scattering in terror. They scream and run from her, eyes wide with fear. Rey notices at last that her lightsaber has ignited pure red, a hallmark of a kyber crystal infused with hate and anger. The arm that holds the saber has grown dark, as if diseased, and the darkness is spreading. It comes over her like a curtain, cloaking her in mottled flesh, in scales. She can’t see her own face but she can feel her vision cloud, and wouldn’t be surprised if her eyes had become the putrid yellow of a Sith apprentice. _

_ The younglings have disappeared into the jungle, and for a moment something burning within her grips her heart - resentment, anger. She feels the urge to pursue them, tastes blood on her tongue. _

_ Then as soon as the urge has come over her, it is gone.  _

_ Rey extinguishes the saber immediately, lets it clatter to the ground like something dead, but it is too late. She has given in to the dark, and the younglings are gone - running from her. _

_ The monster. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this story has taken some slight divergences from the original plot I envisioned, but bear with me! Rey has some hoops to jump through before she's able to locate Ben, but I promise everything is in service of that goal! A few references from this chapter:
> 
> [Chain Worlds Theorem / World Between Worlds](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/World_between_worlds)   
>  [Rammahgon](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Rammahgon)   
>  [Uneti tree / parchment](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Uneti_tree)   
>  [Sith Citadel](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sith_Citadel)   
>  [Battle of Crait](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_of_Crait)   
>  [Galactic Basic](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Galactic_Basic_Standard)   
>  [Ach-to](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Ahch-To)   
>  [Rey's dream in The Force Awakens (this post contains some speculation, but also a screenshot of the scene I'm referencing in the TFA novelization)](https://gwendy85.tumblr.com/post/145910272068)   
>  [Takodana](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Takodana)   
>  [The Jedi Code](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Jedi_Code)   
>  [Bleeding a kyber crystal](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Bleeding)


	5. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey sets out to find a dangerous archive of forbidden knowledge of the Force. Ben Solo awakes to find himself caught somewhere between life and death.

**Chapter Four**

  
  


Rey sits bolt upright in bed, panting. 

The nightmares have grown more common, but never have they been so vivid, or so foreboding. She has a sudden urge to go check on the younglings, to make sure they are unharmed. She takes a moment to register the waking world, to breathe in a semblance of peace. As soon as she has, the edges of the dream have worn away, reassuring her that all is calm.

She reaches out with the Force, but senses no disturbance, save the one within herself.

It is not yet morning, but she knows there will be no returning to sleep. She rises and throws her belongings into her bag along with the wayfinder and the  _ Rammahgon _ . It’s time to move, to see which hopes and dreams have been showing her a true future and which have been deceiving her.

She has one stop to make before departing. If there’s anyone who would know anything about Force-related artifacts and surreptitious Jedi behaviors, especially on Takodana, it’s Maz. 

Rey wants to rush to Maz’s quarters immediately, but the early hour makes it unlikely she’ll be awake. Rey forces herself to down a quarter portion of rations and some water. She is packed and ready to go, but her questions remain, buzzing around inside her, begging to be let out. Instead she goes for a walk in the forest, taking in the greenery, the serenity and quiet. Everything is on the edge of a knife right now, but she can feel the quiet returning, persuading herself last night really was a dream.

She takes the opportunity to sit in the clearing and meditate where she did so many times under Leia’s tutelage. Rey misses Leia with a stab in the chest she doesn’t see coming. It’s all she can do not to reach out to the Force, to ask for guidance. Surely of all people, Ben’s mother would support her in this crazy voyage, built on hopes and visions.

But the signature she does pick up as she reaches out in silence is Maz’s, and her concentration breaks. She must be awake.

Rey sets off back towards the dormitory, and is surprised when Maz meets her halfway to the edge of the forest.

“You’re up early, child,” the smuggler muses, smiling up at Rey. “Where are you off to?”

“Actually, I was hoping to talk to you,” Rey says, shouldering her bag, and suddenly panicking as she realizes she has made up no story to explain what it is she’s doing. She’s not sure how Maz will react if she tells the truth. 

“I’m...taking one of the transports to pick up more refugees from the Mid Rim,” she lies, and hopes against hope that Maz can’t read her true intentions through the Force. She plows on before waiting to read Maz’s face: “I’m going to your homeworld, and I need some advice. Poe warned me to watch out for pirates trafficking in Force-related artifacts, both Sith  _ and _ Jedi.”

“Tell me something new,” Maz says, sweeping a four-fingered hand at the galaxy at large. “I was a pirate queen once myself, you know.” 

Rey furrowed her brow. “Who better to advise me, then? Where on Takodana might I want to avoid if I were looking out for...wayfinding holocrons in particular?”

If Maz had eyebrows, she would have arched one in Rey’s direction. “Holocrons, eh?”

“He mentioned a…a dark archive of sorts,” Rey said, suddenly very interested in her boots.

“You don’t just stumble upon knowledge of the Dark Archive, child,” Maz says suspiciously, narrowing her eyes. “Are you sure it’s Poe you’ve been talking to?”

Rey shrugs. “Maybe I got the name wrong. He mentioned I should be careful. Where should I look...out for it?”

Maz looks long and hard at Rey, and her heart pounds until she realizes Maz is looking  _ through  _ her, into some forgotten past that only she can see. For a while Rey thinks she won’t be getting answers after all, but at length Maz speaks in a hushed voice.

“When the Jedi Temple was destroyed on Coruscant, the Council moved all its ancient artifacts to new locations. Some of the particularly  _ sensitive  _ secrets were moved to the catacombs beneath Takodana Castle. You’ve been there before,” she said, her eyes focusing on Rey again.

“Luke’s saber,” she says softly, her memory exploding with the vision she had seen the first time she touched the saber in the passages beneath Maz’s cantina. Following its call had sent her down the path that brought her here. “I should have known. So they’ve been down there all this time?”

Maz nods. “An archive of ancient knowledge,” she muses.

“But the castle was destroyed in the battle against the First Order,” Rey says, her face falling.

“Perhaps,” Maz says wistfully, “But the archive was constructed carefully - buried in passages that served as tombs for the ancient Jedi.”

“I thought Jedi weren’t buried,” Rey says, puzzled. “They become one with the Force.”

“Then what is in those catacombs, I wonder?” Maz muses with a mischievous smile. “They’re buried deep, somewhere no one will disturb.” Her eyes meet Rey’s knowingly, and Rey squirms. “Dangerous knowledge, in the wrong hands.”

“There is one rising, they say,” Rey says, deflecting. “A shadow, but strong in the Force. Is it true?”

Maz looks up at Rey. “What do your feelings tell you?” she asks, her own eyes closing.

Rey sighs. “I feel a disturbance,” she admits, casting a sidelong glance before closing her own eyes. There is no hiding from Maz, she realizes. 

“Anger? Fear?” Maz asks, sniffing the air as if she can smell them, and for all Rey knows, she can.

“Uncertainty,” Rey says slowly. “Doubt.”

“Grief,” Maz says, her eyes fluttering open. “Longing.”

Tears are already brimming at the corners of Rey’s eyes. “I have to know how things might have been,” she breathes.

“There’s no use in dwelling on what might have been, child,” Maz says gently. “Not when there’s still something that could be done.”

A dam breaks behind Rey’s eyes and the tears come, truly pouring for the first time since she returned from Exegol. She is overwhelmed by the gratitude she feels for Maz’s support.

“You don’t think I’m rejecting my path?” she asks.

“I think it’s wise to focus on what you’re running  _ towards  _ instead of what you’re running  _ from, _ ” Maz says, and Rey smiles through her tears.

“But be wary,” Maz says. “There are things even the Masters hid away because they knew knew they didn’t have the will to resist, and you’re walking into a nest of them.”

“I wish Master Luke was here,” Rey says suddenly, a lump rising in her throat. “He would know what to do.”

“Oh child,” Maz says, laughter wrinkling the corners of her eyes. “How do you think the saber made its way to Takodana?”

“He brought it to you?” Rey shakes her head in disbelief. Right now, Luke’s rejection of the Force and isolation on Ach-to sound echo Rey’s own thoughts. Even in her pursuit of Ben, she can’t escape the question of her future. But even Luke, the last true Jedi Master, had had thoughts of doubt so strong he nearly rejected the entire Jedi Way. It’s strangely comforting.

“He brought it to the archive, yes,” Maz nods. “At that time it was the last thing he wanted to see. But he didn’t go so far as to destroy it. He knew the Archive was one of the best places to keep the ancient secrets safe until someone strong in the Force would come along to claim them for the good of the Order.”

“And you think I’m that person, too?” Rey says, sighing. Even here she can’t escape the hope of a generation.

“I think it won’t hurt you to see what’s there,” Maz says. 

It’s the closest Rey will get to a blessing, and she’ll take it. She wipes her eyes on the back of her hand and straightens.

“Those catacombs contain old ghosts, too,” Maz warns. “Trust your feelings over your eyes - you may be tested.”

Rey nods, turning towards the flight deck. It will be advantageous to leave before it’s crawling with pilots.

“Rey,” Maz calls as she makes her way towards the craft. “May the force be with you.”

Rey smiles again, and heads to Luke’s X-Wing -  _ her  _ X-Wing - and prepares to depart.

  
  
  


***

Ben Solo remembers the Sith temple on Exegol, but before he even opens his eyes it fades like a dream.

He has a funny feeling that he’s back in his childhood home, in bed on a lazy morning, laying there with his eyes closed before he slips out of that in-between place. It’s dark, and smells faintly of gardenias, as if his mother has just left the room.

He scans the space he’s in - is it a cavern or a room? - but the darkness remains. Nothing comes into focus, which he initially finds very unsettling. It’s as if everything is fogged over, and there is no sense of depth. He feels claustrophobic, though he’s not sure why - the space seems to have no edges, and when he moves there is solid ground beneath his feet. There are no walls or obstacles to speak of. He takes a few steps, brushes against nothing.

It’s all very eerie, and he begins to contemplate the possibility that he might be dead.

“Hello?” Ben shouts, if for no other reason than to gauge the size of the space. He feels silly, but there is no one around to laugh, so he begins to move. “This makes no sense,” he mutters under his breath.

Almost before the words have left his lips, something flashes in his peripheral vision, casting a green glow into the void, and he spins to meet it. 

Suddenly Ben Solo is a young man, curled up in another bed, but this time on a sleepless night, as tendrils of nightmares evaporate and he lies awake. This place was supposed to give him the chance to hone his skills, follow in the footsteps of his uncle, but he can’t help thinking his parents are afraid of him. He imagines they have placed him here to keep him away from them as much as to give him an opportunity to control the energy that surges through him when he is angry. He wonders if his mother has sensed a path for him as dark as the one he hears whispered to him like a bedtime story.

The only time he feels control is when the Force is coursing through him, raw and uninhibited, but he fears his own strength in those moments, and the fear is the beginning of all of it. That night splits open before him again, the one where he wakes to Luke Skywalker is standing over him with a lightsaber. He has sensed that darkness too, and he is not the only one who is afraid.

_ No, no, no, _ Ben thinks.  _ This is what I left behind! _

And instantly another vision rises before him: the village on Jakku where he had given the command to burn down an entire village when he could not locate the map to Luke Skywalker; where he had personally struck down Lor San Tekka when he had refused to give up the location of the droid carrying this information.

Ben closes his eyes, but it is as if he has no choice but to watch his past play out before him, and he has never wanted to destroy this part of himself more than he does now. The flames burn on the insides of his eyelids; he has been unable to leave this place when he dreams - each of the planets he has been responsible for destroying, each of the lives he has snuffed out have risen to haunt him more times than he would care to admit. He had not known it then, but it was the first time he had come into Rey’s orbit, igniting their bond. Had she known he was there then? Had she felt it? Had she known it was him?

Ben begins to experience an inkling of what is happening. Is this his version of purgatory? A place where he will be held until he can work out exactly what kind of havoc he has wreaked in the name of the Dark on the worlds he has visited or destroyed since the night the Jedi temple of his youth burned in the night? 

As if in answer, another memory sweeps before him, this time in a sea of green, the next time he had been close enough to feel their bond ignited in a way so strong he can barely explain. The moment he disembarked from his ship on the landing pad outside Maz’s castle, he feels as if he has walked into a dream, and not a dream of his own. He can hear the ghosts in her head, and he knows then, before she ever tells him that he is not alone. 

He understands the pattern: each moment is a time where Rey’s life has intersected with his, bumping him back ever so slightly in the direction of the Light. Especially in these last few days, these last few  _ hours,  _ he wants nothing more than to kill his past and the person he was in those days, but the past has also brought him here. He is stuck in a loop of his own creation.

He sees how each moment folds into the one that comes before it, running like a river that can’t flow backwards, beginning with anger and violence: the unstable flash of his own saber. The fire. The mask. Planets disintegrate, lives are snuffed out, entire worlds are ended at the hands of a monster. The monster he  _ chose  _ to become, bit by bit, as he gives in to the voices in his head - as he chooses dark time after time because he is afraid to see what he might look like in the light. 

The dark before him is illumined and he is standing in a snowy forest, face awash in the clash of red and blue blades. He sees himself bested by the surge in power that had emanated through Rey like lightning - raw and unpredictable, but powerful. Perhaps no other time had the fervor of her conviction crashed into him, leaving him scarred. He traces the lines on his face which have all but disappeared. Where would he be without something catching him off guard like that, challenging his fervent devotion to his grandfather’s legacy? What if he had been successful that day, cutting down this strange enemy before knowing the true nature of their connection? 

Each of these moments have been a tiny crash chipping away at the story he has told himself since his youth: that becoming a monster has been his destiny, and not his choice. 

  
  


***

  
  


As Rey descends into Takodana’s atmosphere, she’s caught off guard once again by just how  _ green  _ everything is...and how beautiful. Living on a jungle moon as she’s done for the past year has accustomed her to the dense canopy of trees, but the scale here is another thing altogether. Great mossy crags jut up from emerald forests. From the air it’s breathtaking.

The X-wing settles into the open space near Takodana Castle that once teemed with merchants, smugglers, and pirates to dock an unimaginable variety of ships in every state of repair. It’s not exactly desolate - there are still a few freighters and skimmers parked here and there - but as Rey disembarks, she can see that things are definitely more grim on the ground.

Rey barely recognizes the path she walked from the landing pad with Han and Finn. Portions of the great stone building still rise into the sky, but the surroundings have become a mess of crushed architecture and failed machinery. Everything is a jumble of gray now - stone and metal - and the air hangs heavy over the wreckage. There is a chill about this place despite the humidity.

“The entrance should be here,” Rey muses, picking her way across a boulder field of former castle walls towards the spot Maz’s statue once stood, and banners in every color under the sun flapped in the breeze. It appears hopeless - the heavy pillars guarding the entry have collapsed in on themselves, sealing off the entrance from any would-be scavengers or thieves, of which there have been some, she notes. Metal parts have been stripped bare, adornments removed from the portions of the castle that have come crashing down.

With no option of entering by the front door, Rey continues to make her way through the maze of stone, looking for any sign of a way to enter the rear portions of the cantina, where she had strayed those long months ago when Luke’s saber called to her. She pokes at the debris with her old staff, which feels familiar in her hands. It brings her balance and utility, and a kind of comfort as it did in her scavenger days.

When things were simpler.

_ And you were much worse off,  _ she reminds herself, feeling guilty for shrugging off the events of the last several years - the generosity and kindness of her newfound family, the way that had reached out to her and supported her. The way they had offered their  _ understanding _ .

She reaches into her pocket and touches her memory crystal for reassurance. Should she embrace the past, or kill it? It can’t be both.

She shakes her head. Ben is in her future, and if she forgets that, it could be too late.

She stands again, renews her search. The sun has risen, and despite the grey of sky, she feels it burning down on her through the mist. Sweat drips down her back. She picks through the remnants of the place for what feels like hours with no success.

“This can’t be,” she says in frustration, massaging her temples, looking for some sign that there is a way to get beneath the ruins.

_ Trust your feelings over your eyes. _

Maz has already warned her.

Rey sighs and closes her eyes, reaching out with the Force.

She has barely settled into her inner silence when something pulls at her, dances along the edge of her consciousness. It is like the feeling she had in the cantina that lured her away from the table, drew her down the stairs...but somehow  _ darker _ \- heavy with warning as much as meaning.

Rey feels for the source of this call and moves toward it. The mess is strangely more navigable with her eyes half-closed, her focus honing in on the signal drawing her. It’s as if something ancient and slow is bubbling up from underground, betraying its origin. Rey stumbles on, and when at last she comes to the edge of the ruin, she opens her eyes.

And there it is: a crack in the foundation of one of the walls. More than a crack, she realizes as she draws closer - the perspective of two overlapping sheets of stone widens as she approaches, and she realizes that there is room to slip between them. Her gaze moves down the slabs to the ground where an opening is visible. When viewed from the side it looks like nothing more than another collapsed section of wall. But when Rey steps between the slabs and faces the opening head on, she can see there is a step, followed by another.

A staircase, nearly invisible to the casual passerby.

She steps on the stop of the staircase, tentatively, then takes another step downward, and another. She pauses before descending totally underground, peering into the darkness.

A breeze from below - a  _ breath?  _ \- blows a tendril of hair across her face. A shiver makes its way down Rey’s spine; it is excitement and fear all at once.

She looks around to see if she has been followed - and then she descends.

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Maz Kanata](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Maz_Kanata)   
>  [Takodana Castle](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Takodana_Castle)   
>  [Holocron](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Holocron)   
>  [Jedi Archives](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Jedi_Archives)   
>  [Destruction of Luke Skywalker's Jedi Temple](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Destruction_of_Luke_Skywalker%27s_Jedi_temple)   
>  [Lor San Tekka](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Lor_San_Tekka)


	6. Chapter Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben faces the ghosts of his past as he is stuck between life and death. Rey locates information on Takodana that will lead her to Ben, as she fights the pull of the Dark. She can't shake the feeling something is following her.

**Chapter Five**

  
  


Images of the past flash before Ben Solo’s eyes, bleeding from the darkness into his consciousness, as if he is reliving them. 

_ This is what they say happens before you die _ , he thinks, but every inch of him aches so keenly that he thinks he must not quite be dead.

Many of these memories are painful, steeped in fire and blood. Many make him wish he could turn time backwards, erase the monster responsible for so much suffering and death. But this one comes to him like a soothing balm; like falling out of a nightmare into a pleasant dream.

It is the moment he first  _ sees  _ her, though it is not the first time they have spoken face to face. She approaches the mirror wall in the cave on Ach-to, and she is  _ right there  _ on the other side of the portal, close enough to touch. She pauses, looking into the depths of the mirror for answers he can’t give her. But there is so much separating them: time, distance, a hundred whispered voices; a hundred choices bent in just the wrong direction.

Still, he can’t shake the feeling that she sees him, too.

He has felt desperation in this place, but until this moment he hasn’t realized how helpless he feels. Helpless to make his way back, if that is something he can even do. Helpless to make things right. He can’t reach out to her; can’t even tell her how close she really is to saving him.

And then a thought comes to him.  _ What if she already has? _

Just the existence of this strange place - or is it a time? - that is all other moments at once hints at possibilities he can barely imagine. He can’t explain how, but he feels that if he can figure out how to do it, just one touch, one breath could send the future off in a new direction. He brings his attention back to the parade of his past, a puzzle presenting itself to him one scene at a time, and waits for the answer to reveal itself.

He is with Rey in the cave again, and she is looking into the abyss with a longing that could truly be a reflection of his own eyes. It won’t be long until she returns to the clifftop ruins of Ach-to’s deserted cloister. She will warm herself by a fire built to route the blustery chill. She will stare into the flames, disappointed and alone, frustrated enough to reach out to him - the ghost at the other end of a bond she does not yet fully understand.

And when she does, he will know what it feels like to have someone peer into his soul, and really understand what they find there _.  _ For the first time they will find that their bond truly transcends space and time. He aches for that bond now; realizes how much he has missed it. He has to find his way back to her. He is not used to waiting - he is used to striking out, to acting on his desires. It is maddening to be unable to speak with her, to even know where she is. 

Ben hadn’t realized it at the time, but he sees now that this moment on the cliffs had been his undoing in the best way. He and Rey have always been able to see each other - that was never a choice. But this moment, when they both agreed to truly show themselves to each other had lodged itself in a hidden part of him. It had begun to unravel him irrevocably despite his return to habits of anger and violence, those paths worn smooth from use.

He sees why Rey could not accept his proposal in Snoke’s throne room despite having worked together to defeat the nightmare that has preyed on him for years. She is the last of her kind, and while her path weighs on her, it is equally impossible for her to give up. She has been told all these years that restoring balance to the Force is up to her, but this is a lie. No matter what multitudes an individual contains, no one can bring balance alone, but he is amazed at how hard she has fought for it; how earnestly she has attempted to rise in the Light because she sees it as a necessity to the cosmic scheme of things, and her place within it. Where the Sith seek only power, she seeks restraint, balance. He used to see it as foolishness, even weakness not to grasp at everything the Force can give. But perhaps choosing a narrow path can mean a lighter burden. 

And Ben has been a part of her path for much longer than he realizes. That day in the forest on Takodana he suddenly realizes that the feeling he has had since he was a youngster training in Luke’s Jedi temple has a face. Her eyes are frozen in fear, and he sees reflected in her the same question that comes to him at night, tugs at him, asks something of him bigger than his capacity to deliver.

_ Which path will you choose? _

At that moment he is grateful for the mask, because the question scares him, too.

  
  


***

Rey leans into the staircase, a low wind breathing from below. It’s dark, but it feels  _ alive.  _ Electricity traces her spine; she can’t tell if it’s fear...or excitement. It’s the same feeling as when Ben appeared in her room - as if the future is tugging her  _ towards  _ something, asking something of her.

She makes her way forward into the gloom.

The air around her is hot and close, but there is a breeze moving, originating from below. The dirt floors of the passage lead to a place where the path splits, and Rey stops to see if she can tell where the breeze is emanating from. Instinctively, she takes the path that snakes to the right, and she feels the pull more strongly.

She is several dozen yards down the passage when something catches her peripheral vision. She whirls, looking back at the split where she was just standing, expecting to see someone following her, but there is nothing. She retraces her steps, looks back toward the wider opening, and sees no one. 

She retraces her steps, continuing down the passage, senses heightened. Suddenly every shadow seems as if it’s moving.

_ Don’t trust your eyes, _ Maz’s voice echoes in her mind, and she moves cautiously, one step at a time. These passages may once have been tombs, but this darkness feels alive. Rey wouldn’t be surprised if someone actually did step out of one of the grottoes, but all she hears is a soft rain of dirt filtering down from the walls from above. 

Within several twists and turns of the surface, shafts of watery light interrupt the dark of the catacombs, speaking to cracks in the ceiling above. Rey wonders who the last one to walk this path was, and how stable the walls are since the castle’s collapse. Occasionally, pebbles skitter across the floor, and Rey is convinced she hears footsteps, but she never sees movement again. 

At length she stops in front of a wall covered in ancient vines, unsure whether to continue. A grotto has been set into the wall to hold a corpse, but it is empty as one would expect in a catacombs built for those who lose their bodies in death, departing to an unseen world while their spirit remains behind. 

So why the grotto?

Rey traces the wall with her hand, dragging it over the tangled vines, which inexplicably still contain green leaves, though they are coated in dust. The surface feels almost  _ warm,  _ and Rey pulls at one of the vines, which pulls at the others, and soon she has uncovered the outline of a doorway set into the grotto wall. She closes her eyes and extends a hand toward the opening. She envisions heavy locks and bolts, but as soon as she has moved to open the door it responds in kind, cracking and groaning at her intent, separating itself from the stone around it and sliding aside to reveal a dark entry. 

Rey takes a deep breath and steps into the dark.

Her eyes adjust to the dark. Rey expects dust, cobwebs, and ancient gloom, but what she sees when the light from the passageway spills into the chamber could not be more different. 

It’s much more _cluttered,_ for one thing - more storehouse than library. Rather than stone tables and parchment scrolls, or artifacts set into ornate displays, there are pieces of machinery scattered everywhere, contraptions displayed haphazardly on metal shelves. At her presence a sensor springs to life and a soft light bathes the space from sconces on the wall. The mechanical items sprawled over workbenches and shelves could be something out of a workshop. It looks as if someone has only just left a thousand small projects in various stages of completion.

But the space is  _ luminous. _

A breath of air hits Rey as she walks in, which should be impossible, as sealed as this place has been purported to be. She walks in between two banks of shelves taller than she is, which begin near the door and continue, row upon row, to the back of the chamber, which is larger than she first realized. Each shelf is lined with row after row of palm-sized objects of metal, stone, crystal, and a hundred other materials from every reach of the galaxy. Some of them glow while others hover, though they all have an anchor to their particular place.

There is a hum about this room - it simmers with the whispers of a thousand generations. Perhaps catacomb is the right term after all.

Rey walks down the aisle into the recesses of this place, which is deeper than she initially realizes. She examines each of the objects on the shelf, all of which are approximately the size of her fist, just like the wayfinder she carries with her. 

“How am I ever going to find the right one?” she breathes, heart pounding as she looks around in wonder. There are thousands if not millions of tiny geodesic objects, and she has no idea what the function of any of them is. She considers a pyramidal gadget, but realizes it’s made of slate rather than the lighter gray stone her Sith wayfinder is composed of. 

As in any situation where she isn’t initially sure how to proceed, she closes her eyes and reaches out.

Almost instantly she is mobbed by a thousand voices, a thousand images of Jedi masters of the past...and the Sith masters as well. The immensity of knowledge contained in this place practically cries out to be released. Masters whisper their secrets to students in another generation, but Rey balks at the sheer volume of noise. She drops her hand immediately and the chamber goes silent.

Frustration rises in Rey. In the quiet she can breathe again, but she is sure a piece of the puzzle that will get her to Ben is located mere feet away. It would be insanity to leave without it. She steels herself to re-enter the fray.

This time she is prepared for the cacophony of the room, but she slices through the noise with a singular focus on the holocron she needs; holds its crystalline contours in her mind.

She realizes that she is grasping her memory crystal in her pocket as well. She has taken to closing her hand over it when she needs reassurance, but now it is a plea - a warning that if she isn’t singular in her focus, a memory of Ben is all she will leave this place with.

“Be with me,” she whispers as she walks between the shelves, seeing what calls to her. Her eyes fall on a derelict datapad attached to one of the shelves near the entrance - an index to the archive.

“Brilliant,” she breathes, wiping it off, watching the dusty screen illuminate. She searches every term she can think of that might connect the dots and explain to her how to reach the portal to the place where Ben is. She tries ‘holocron’, ‘World between Worlds’, ‘wayfinder’, ‘portal’. As an afterthought she types in “flow walking” and marks down that index as well. It’s an esoteric practice, but at this point she’ll grasp at anything.

Several sections of a diagram of the chamber illumine, and the datapad spits out a recommendation for a few indexed items. She figures out the arrangement of the diagram and makes her way down a row of shelves in search of the results. She expects them to be texts, but when she locates the indicated shelves, she finds that each item is a metallic object similar to her wayfinder. Most are cubes, but some are complex geometric shapes, each with some kind of crystal located at its center.

Rey knows from her study of the texts that these are likely Jedi holocrons based on their shape. She pockets each one in turn, hoping she can extract the information they contain en route to Ach-to in an effort to learn anything she can about where Ben is located and how to get him back. The Sith are known for pyramidal holocrons, but she has made her way through the entire list, and none of the objects she has procured looks remotely like her wayfinder.

Rey sighs, brow furrowing. Why is it that objects only call to her when she isn’t anticipating them? She would give anything for the wayfinder to call to her just as Luke’s saber did just over a year ago in a cellar not far from this one. She has learned to summon that saber to herself - could it work with the holocron as well? She reaches out with her hand and concentrates on the holocron, pictures it in her mind. She focuses on its singular signature and concentrates, eyes scrunched shut.

And suddenly, she feels something in her palm. She half expects to see the holocron there, summoned from a distant vault, but it’s more like a tug, an invisible ribbon pulling her towards a source. She follows it to a shadowy corner of the archive. The objects here seethe with some kind of dark energy, and Rey feels immediately on edge. A shiver traces her spine as whispers seem to echo in her mind, dark masters of the past tempting her to apprenticeship to resurrect their legacy. Her blood runs cold.

_ Sith blood,  _ a voice taunts her.  _ Claim your birthright! _

“No!” she says aloud, shattering her concentration, and the silence of the space. Irked, she shakes the voice away, scans the area with intent. She has come too far to be swayed now.

And suddenly, there it is: the wayfinder she seeks.

It thrums with life, and the blue crystal within pulses like a tiny living thing. This wayfinder is truly the twin of its Sith counterpart, humming with a golden plasma and blue lodestone in a white pyramidal structure, whereas the Exegol wayfinder was obsidian-black with green plasma and a red lodestone. Rey examines it, trying to make sense of how it works. It looks every bit the mirror image of the one Ben had given her.

She can barely believe it - this is her key to the portal on Ach-to. Her hand trembles as she reaches out for it. She doesn’t know exactly  _ how  _ it will open the portal _ ,  _ but surely one of the other holocrons she has procured will explain the process. It’s easy enough to read the crystal in a datacron - it has to be similar.

As Rey removes it, her eyes fall on a black cube behind it. The wayfinder is already in her bag, but the invisible ribbon in her palm tugs at her insistently, nearly moving her hand without her permission. Before she knows exactly why, she moves to pick up that holocron, too. 

Her hand hovers over it, and the entire archive seems to hold its breath in anticipation. She picks it up, holds it up to the light. It is nearly opaque, onyx-black, rimmed with gold. It feels  _ heavy,  _ not just in weight, but in foreboding. This object contains something pivotal to her future, she can feel it.

She is tucking it into her bag when something in her peripheral vision moves.

Rey jerks upright, clutching the bag to her chest, prickles racing like alarms down her arms and neck. She scans the shadows, sure she saw someone slip between two of the shelves. She tiptoes towards the shelf where she saw the shadow disappear, and braces herself, peers around the corner.

Nothing.

She backs toward the entryway, scanning the room, her heart pounding so loud in her ears she’s sure it’s audible in the room as well.

Sure that whoever’s in here with her can hear it, too.

There’s no sound in the passageway, but a long sigh of wind blows out from the room, making Rey jump and the hair on her neck stand on end.

She steels herself, waits for something to leap at her from the shadows, but nothing happens. She raises a hand, and the door to the chamber slides shut, falling into place with a heavy  _ clunk  _ as the vines close over it again. 

Rey  _ runs  _ back down the passage. If there is something -  _ someone? -  _ following her, it should be stuck in the Archive, but Rey isn’t convinced that whatever she senses will let a stone barrier stop it for long.

Grasping at her staff instead, she retraces her steps, looking for the staircase from which she descended. When she sees it, she mutters some hurried gratitude to the Masters, and bolts up the stairs, looking for signs of light to follow to the surface. It has begun to rain, and Rey makes a beeline for the X-wing, scanning her surroundings as she heads for the edge of the landing pad.

The forest has encroached a bit, and Rey looks into the green undergrowth, remembering the first day when she ran into those woods. It seems like a lifetime ago now. She had been running from the First Order, but ended up colliding with her destiny in Ben. If anyone had told her that day that she would be flying from one planet to another, solving ancient puzzles and fleeing ancient ghosts in order to save the man who had pursued her, she would never have believed it. Time is a strange sort of alchemy, transforming beliefs and choices, she decides. She has no other explanation.

Rey clambers into the X-wing and closes the airlock behind her. She barely breathes until she can feel the craft lifting off the ground, course set for Ach-to. Her heart is pounding - she can’t tell whether from fear or from the run through the catacombs. She tries to steady herself, calm her mind.

“Emotion, yet peace,” she whispers, closing her eyes and declining to follow that mantra through to its conclusion. 

The X-wing revs to life, and her breathing evens out. If she can procure the right data from the holocrons she has collected, she could be very close to locating the portal on Ach-to; to entering the place where Ben is; to bringing him back. She hopes she has chosen the right artifacts; listened to the right voices.

Rey gives one last look as she begins to move towards her final shot at setting things right, and Takodana shrinks beneath her. It becomes again the jewel-green utopia it seems when viewed from above, then a small dot in her periphery, then nothing.

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [datapad](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Datapad)   
>  [datacron](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Datacron)   
>  [Jedi holocrons](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Jedi_holocron)   
>  [Sith holocrons](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sith_holocron)


	7. Interlude: Two Riddles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is mainly an intermission and a promise that the end of this story is coming. Chapters 6-8 are drafted, and they WILL be up as soon as possible; in the meantime please enjoy this little flash fiction to tie the first few chapters to the last few.

Two dreamers. Two specters. Two riddles:

An angry boy, raised on tales whispered in the dark, is shepherded into the shadow of a figure whose path he dreams of emulating but whose power he fears he will never achieve. He crafts a mask to resemble the one this figure wears, crafts it impenetrable enough to keep the heartbreak out, impermeable enough to keep the fear inside. He almost forgets the mask requires cracks: one to let the light meet his eyes; one to let breath meet his lips: in, out….in, out. He hates the stunted, metallic sound of it because it reminds him that he needs something other than himself to survive. He almost never takes it off, but when he does he thinks it whispers to him at night, when he is alone: “You think you remember me, but there are things they never showed you. When you meet me, how will you know the difference between a memory and a dream?” The boy pretends he doesn’t hear. He has no memories of this man, only stories, and so the dream takes shape, takes hold, blossoms like a vine that will only ever bear dark fruit.

A lonely girl, left to her own devices, marks down each day as it fades into the past, but she is looking the other way: into a future so bright it blinds her. There is no way to deny what can’t be seen, and so she dreams. She feels a tug at the part of her that broke away when they left her here alone, and knows that someone must be out there. Still, every day that passes without a reconciliation leaves her wondering: what would she say to them if they were to return? Sometimes at night tears spill onto her blanket, but sometimes she lies still and silent as a saber waiting to be drawn. She is glad no one can see how sharp her jaw is in the darkness, how black her eyes are as she lies awake. She feels that she is not herself; she wonders what she might be capable of. By morning that darker self has always wandered off again, no traces to be found, except an echo in her mind of a question no one has asked: “What kind of monster casts no shadow?” It is always a relief to step out into the morning sun and feel it hot on her shoulders, and see that her shadow still falls on the sand beside her. She is solid; she is not going anywhere.


	8. Chapter Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Before returning for Ben, Rey must confront and choose between two possible futures as she nears the portal to the World Between Worlds.

**Chapter Six**   
  
  


The island catches Rey off guard, though she has seen it a thousand times in dreams. The way Ahch-to wraps itself in stormy waters makes it difficult to pinpoint. She has seen the world on which it waits, but it takes her eyes some time to find it from the air. By the time Rey’s boots have hit the mossy slate of the clifftops she can sense that something is terribly wrong.

_ Hurry, hurry, hurry,  _ she thinks, running towards the cliffs’ edge, towards the path that leads down to the outcropping that has haunted her dreams since the first time she visited the island.

“Ben!” she calls out, though she’s not sure why. She thinks that if there’s anywhere their bond could reignite it would be here, among the ruins. It wouldn’t be the first time. “I’m coming.  _ I’m coming!” _

If he can hear her, she won’t need words, but she shouts them anyway. Perhaps the promise is for her. She needs to believe it’s not too late already, but the wind whips rain across her face, carrying her words away.

She is halfway down the precipice when she sees it again: that movement in her periphery. And this time it looks somehow familiar. A sinking feeling, a flash of shifting metal and crashing waves jogs her memory. Her eyes cannot pin it down but her mind convinces her that this thing she can’t seem to see is something she has seen before.

Rey whips around, but there is no one there. Of course there isn’t. She shakes her head, blinks her eyes. She hasn’t been sleeping much lately, and when she has, her dreams have been strange. She wouldn’t be surprised if they are bleeding into her waking existence. But what does it matter? Dreams, visions, waking world - all of it means one thing: something dark is pursuing her. Something that has been here all along.

“Focus,” she whispers, silently willing the movement away - like she wishes she could will away her future, her responsibility to train the next generation of Jedi. Like she wishes Ben was still with her. Like she wishes Exegol had just been a bad dream.

Which is to say: she wishes in vain.

_ You’re alone, you’re alone, you’re alone. _

It echoes through her head as she picks her way down, down, down, using her staff to keep balance as she scans the mountain paths for telltale signs of the entrance to the mirror cave. She recognizes the flat stone outcropping lashed by waves and rain. It rests between two steep cliffs, stormy sky above, jagged shoals below. Had it not been covered in slippery kelp and moss, it might have made a pleasant place to survey the sea on a calm day, but the calm days she can recall on Temple Island are few and far between.

Rey makes her way out onto the outcropping, edging her way towards the eye-like chasm in the center. The memory of falling makes her feel as if the bottom has dropped out of her stomach, but she is ready this time: she peers into the gloom below and concentrates on the Force. She edges towards the opening and releases…

Descends…

The cave below seems a different world from the one she just left. It is darkly golden where the world outside is all greens and greys. It is wet, yes, but there is no rain pelting her here, save beneath the opening. Within there is nothing but stillness while the storm rails without.

Rey sees the mirror wall immediately. She reaches for the holocrons in her bag, and reassures herself they are still there. Her heart pounds as she approaches the smoothed stone surface. This isn’t the first time she has found herself in this place seeking answers, but now that she knows the origins of her family, she has found only more questions buried beneath.

_ Will I ever be sure of anything? Will I ever be able to trust my own mind? _

Rey breathes deeply, choosing to focus on another possibility. If she has understood correctly, this is the place where there is some chance of stepping into that in-between world - a world she can bring Ben back from. She reaches out, brushing the burnished stone with her fingertips.

There was a time she thought she felt Ben’s presence here, been sure she saw him reflected in the mirror, but she knows places like this can play tricks. In the end, what she was sure of seeing was only herself - her past and future splayed out like ripples in a pool. This time, the wall shows only her reflection, if a darker version of it.

“How do I get to you?” she asks aloud, reaching out a hand towards her reflection - towards what is beyond it. The stone is just stone, rough and solid.

“That depends on what you’re willing to do,” a voice behind her says, calm and cold.

Rey hears the familiar whir of a lightsaber springing to life, and whirls, reaching for her own saber. She realizes too late she doesn’t have one. She brandishes her staff instead, but nearly drops it as horror sinks into her bones.

So this is what has been following her.

+++

Ben Solo is no longer aware how long he has been in this netherworld, watching his past unfold around him. It may have been hours; it may have been a lifetime. He feels himself losing hope, growing further from the life he has left. When the visions cease, what will become of him? He feels himself approaching a place of nothingness. No more memories. No more choices. Only sleep, no dreams.

He wonders if it takes everyone this long to leave their lives when there is no more living left to do.

_ No, no, no! Not yet! She’s still coming! _

The visions continue. Many of them bring him pain, but none so much as the ones where there is no one wounding him or whispering to him. For each of these there is an atrocity he has committed on his own: someone he has injured, killed, left hurting or alone. There are entire  _ worlds  _ he has obliterated in his pain and anger.

And then there are the voices…even here he cannot escape them. His idols throughout his life, those whose devotion to the Dark Side convinced him that power was a way to escape pain have found new ways to torment him, even in death. With the end of Kylo Ren, they hiss, has come the end of greatness, of atonement. With the rejection of his path, without his mask and saber, there will be nothing for him to do in this purgatory, save to contemplate his failures and shortcomings.

_ Unless you can find a way to escape,  _ the voices hiss.  _ You told the girl how to get here, didn’t you? A clever ruse...best pray she doesn’t come too late. _

“Get out of my  _ head!”  _ Ben screams. “Haven’t you given up on me yet?!”

And for the moment the voices do cease.

He is unsurprised, he supposes, to be haunted by the deceivers who have groomed him for what should have been a life of unparalleled power. He laughs bitterly. Even here they offer a hollow hope - an opportunity to steep himself still deeper in the darkness. Vader, Snoke, Palpatine himself...it doesn’t matter now. The voices which have served as a rudder and a goad over the years are as much a part of him as anything else. Even if their promises now seem false, why shouldn’t they continue to visit him, now that he is one of them?

But this place is not about to let him rest.

The images that come next are the departures in his life: his parents, dropping him off with his uncle to train; Luke walking away from the ruins of the temple Ben had been responsible for burning; Rey escaping on the Falcon after killing Snoke, shutting down the bond between them. As soon as he had found a companion in his struggle, he had pushed her too far, and she had left him. In the end, everyone does.

_ Not everyone,  _ something prompts him, and he winces. The closer he has grown to Rey, the more he can see the lies for what they are. He is not sure how he never realized that no triumph or trophy he could ever have presented in fealty to the Empire would have made those voices stop whispering in his ear.

For the moment things are quiet here too, and Ben waits. Centuries pass - or minutes. He can’t be certain. He wanders through this space, viewing different moments from his life. Most make him wince and turn away, but he keeps returning to his last memories of Exegol, viewing them over and over. 

And then there are the memories of the life he never had: leaving Exegol with Rey and beginning their life together. Rising to be Supreme Leader of the First Order, then Emperor - a dark fate. Meeting at long last his grandfather through a Force vision, and realizing how wrong he had been about the man whose life he had emulated, down to every last panel and divot of his mask.

_ What is the difference between a memory and a dream?  _

The old question plays through his head. Perhaps the only difference is that a memory has already happened - that it is a dream realized at the cost of all others. Here where he can see all of these possibilities at once, it is clear which path he wants to take. He aches to talk with Rey, to see her again, to set things right. There are cracks in his soul so deep that he understands why parts of him hate the other parts: he is monster and victim all at once. But Rey knows this about him - she has been there all along. There is much for him left to atone for, and much to heal, but that is the only version of his future in which healing can occur - he’s sure of it.

But why hasn’t she come? He can’t be certain that time isn’t playing tricks on him, but everything in his life has told him that people leave, and they don’t come back.

_ But you could. _

He supposes it is true. If Rey is on her way to him, perhaps this place will account for their intentions. He’s not certain how it works, but maybe they can find the place where their memories meet and secure some kind of hope. It sounds outlandish, but the impossible has already presented itself to him time and time again in this place.

Maybe all he has to do is find the door and step through...

Ben locates the portal more quickly than he expects. Perhaps the Force  _ does  _ work in this place, or perhaps it is the netherworld’s own cosmic reasoning, but it seems that once Ben has made a decision, the right path is presented to him.

He approaches the portal, ready to return. He does not know why he has been given this second chance, or how, but he knows that once he is with Rey again, things can begin to set themselves right.

He takes a breath and steps through.

  
  


+++

  
  


Rey stares at the figure before her in disbelief.

As if she is looking into the cave’s mirror wall, before her stands another version of herself. This one wears a sneer and a black cloak, lithe and dangerous, with a voice that drips malice like honey.

The phantom from Kef Bir has returned.

She has Rey locked into her sights like a wolf advancing on a rabbit. She cracks open her red saber like a pen knife, igniting the two crimson blades, angry energy humming with anticipation. This is not the unstable kyber crystal of Kylo’s former weapon - this is the intensely focused inferno of a crystal that has been bled with anger and intense hatred. There is no faltering in its gleam; no failure in its intent.

What is this nightmare she has stumbled into?

“Who are you?” Rey asks, hoarse. She grips her staff, ready to defend herself, or to strike if necessary.

“Don’t you understand?” Her mirror double asks, head tilted, advancing. “I’m your future.” 

And Rey does understand.

She  _ has  _ seen this version of herself before, and not just on Kef Bir. The shadow that slipped away by dawn on those sleepless nights on Jakku has proved to be cast by something more real than Rey had hoped. Every nightmare she has forgotten upon waking comes crashing back to her.

This is the version of herself she has seen in every vision that keeps her from taking on the role of Jedi master; this is the Rey she has seen, cold and commanding, ascending the throne of the Sith. It has been whispering to her, coaxing her to alchemize her anger into power ever since those long nights of her childhood where the loneliness built into something colder and sharper.  _ This  _ is that version of herself, the one she has tried so hard not to become, and this wild place has brought them face to face.

“No,” Rey says, shaking her head adamantly. “You’re not.”

“Don’t lie to yourself,” the dark Rey purrs, cunning and cruel, her face washed in the red glow of her saber. “You’ve sensed it a hundred times, and you choose to fear it. It’s time to let all of that go now. That’s why you’ve come, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?” Rey asks, stepping backward towards the mirror wall. The double steps closer, the red of her saber reflecting off the mirror wall behind Rey, and the one behind her as well. An infinite loop of crimson blades crescendos and diminishes on the walls on either side of them.

The dark double’s face clouds, as if she shares Rey’s confusion. “You’ve come to do what your grandfather could not. Surely you learned about the portal from him? You carry the key with you, just as he did -” she gestures to Rey’s bag, and Rey instinctively puts a protective hand over the stash of holocrons. “The Sith who can enter the World Between Worlds would possess untold power.”

“No!” Rey shakes her head. “I ended all of that. I made my choice!”

“Did you?” The dark vision scoffs, approaching. “It’s been a year and you have yet to take on a pupil. Unless I’m mistaking that staff for a crude weapon, you haven’t even crafted your own saber. But who can blame you? Deep down you know better than to bow to an order that asks you to deny the power you feel in your core. It’s still there, waiting for you to come to your senses.”

Rey’s mind reels. Has Palpatine attempted to enter this portal before? Suddenly Luke’s notes on the pages of the  _ Rammahgon  _ make sense - if one can only enter the portal if they are strong in the Light, that would preclude a Sith from entering. But is the phantom simply baiting her, or telling the truth? Will her blood prevent her from entering the portal as well?

Rey reluctantly draws a holocron from her bag. It is the cube-shaped Sith one that she grabbed on impulse as she left the dark archive. The apparition grins and nods, indicating she has chosen correctly, and lowers her saber. “Go on...I’ll wait. It’s best you see this while you still have time to choose.” She smirks, waiting for Rey to decide.

Rey sighs, and picks up the gold-rimmed onyx cube, hovering her free hand over the one holding the holocron. She has come too far not to know what this object can tell her, whether or not it’s something she wants to hear. The phantom seems content enough to let her proceed; Rey closes her eyes and tunes in to the Force.

She feels the object hum there in her palm; feels something split. She can’t tell if it is within the holocron or within herself. Like a flame, the jet-dark cube leaps to life, and its geometric sheath peels away like petals, opening in a mechanical blossom. A glow emanates from within.

A hologram materializes, and Rey opens her eyes. She and her dark double bend towards the image, mirrored on either side of the ball of green light. Rey peers into it, and sees...a sea of dark paths. It’s an encoded memory, she realizes - someone else’s memory.

An apprentice is suspended in the fathomless depths of a cosmic plane unlike anything Rey has ever seen. It is strung with paths and portals, and for the first time she realizes that Ahch-to and Exegol may be only two of a myriad of entries into this place. The apprentice is moving down the paths, peering into portals, viewing moments from his own life that have cascaded to bring him to this place.

At one point, he peers into a moment where his Master, a Togruta Jedi, about to be killed by a powerful Sith lord, and without thinking, he enters the door to that world, disrupting this chain of events, breaking into a time in which he does not belong. Brashly, perhaps, he pulls her back into that nether place, forever indebting her to himself, tangling their timelines as he removes her from the duel that could have been her undoing. He  _ saves  _ her.

_ So it is possible,  _ Rey breathes, her heart pounding.

Once safe, though, the pair wanders through the plane, trying to make sense of it, trying to figure out their path. A portal opens and a face appears that has featured in every one of Rey’s nightmares for the past year. Emperor Palpatine appears on the opposite side of the portal, and this is no memory - it is a monster, very real, who is trying to end them so he can take this place from them; so he can obtain the power they possess, which seems to have eluded him somehow. Blue flames burn around the portal’s edges, and he reaches for them, attempts to cast his dark energy into the portal to bring them to him.

Only he can’t do it.

The portal will not let him pass, and his power is too weak to draw them out of this plane and into his clutches. In a fit of rage, the portal collapses around him, and the Master and her apprentice escape.

The hologram dies, and Rey finds herself face to face with her double, face awash in the red flame of her saber.

“You see?” the apparition smirks. “You’ll never be able to enter. But power isn’t all you’re after, is it?” she asks, observing Rey lingering over the images as they dissipate.

Rey shakes her head. “I don’t want to rule the galaxy.”

The double looks at her, disdain plain on her drawn, pale face, but she says nothing. Rey can tell that she doesn’t understand. The thing that drives this phantom, this alternative version of herself, has always been to find an outlet for her rage. The endless power of the Sith has proven to be the only container large enough into which to pour her bitterness and anger, and she cannot understand someone who doesn’t thirst for it the way she does. It reminds Rey of Ben - the old Ben - and she softens a bit.

“Sometimes I don’t even want to be a Jedi,” Rey admits. She thinks of all the younglings currently gathered on Ajan Kloss, and thinks of herself at that age, waiting for someone - anyone - to return for her. The fear that coils itself deep in her belly unwinds and stretches. How can she give them the thing that was always denied her? How can she trust herself to give the reassurance she doesn’t know how to feel? But she knows the alternative is not something she can agree to. “But I certainly don’t want to be a Sith,” she continues. “If I try to enter this in-between world with the intention of ruling the galaxy, you’re right. I won’t succeed. I will fail, and I will fall, just like every Emperor who has ever thought himself worthy. All I want is to bring Ben back.”

Rey barely has time to finish before the apparition is upon her. This is not something she can accept. Out of nowhere, she swings at Rey with the crimson saber, teeth bared, quick with a rage that makes Rey’s heart skip a beat.

Without thinking, Rey swings at her attacker with the staff she used to ward off scrappers on Jakku. She makes contact, and the apparition stumbles backwards, holding her hand to her jaw where the staff has grazed her. The double lunges again, and this time the blade sings close enough for Rey to feel the heat.

“What does it matter to you if I succeed?” Rey shouts, holding her staff in one hand, placing the other, outstretched, between herself and the apparition.

But as she says the words, she sees the haunted anguish in her double’s eyes as she clings to her weapon. If Rey does not ascend the throne, all this dark double will become is a dream - and one that Rey herself has woken from. It will be the end of her.

“Do you have any idea what worlds could have been built and destroyed with what you chose to throw away?” the double sneers.

Rey looks into the troubled, jet-black depths of the phantom’s eyes - what her own eyes would look like with all the light gone out of them. “Has there ever been a world you loved as much as a person?” she asks, in answer. As she says it, a warmth spreads through her middle, and creeps up her neck. She has never said it aloud, even if it is what has been driving her this last year.

“Love?” the double spits, her lips twisting into a cruel imitation of a smile. “Let me be clear - there is no saving Ben Solo. He’s using you as a way to take back the throne - that’s all.”

Rey shakes her head. “He wouldn’t do that.”

“There’s a shadow growing,” the double insists. “You’ve sensed it. You feel it in yourself, and you’re afraid. You think it might be you, but look at you...anyone would be a fool to fear you! No. The two of you have always been connected, and now his darkness is poisoning your bond. That’s why you can’t feel him. He’s tempting you, asking you to bring him back so he can finish what he failed to do. And you’re about to give it to him.”

“He’s changed!”

“You can’t know that,” the double spits, “even if you share a bond. He’s capable of lying to you - he’s done it before.”

Rey pauses. There have been times that she has not trusted Ben, times she has not understood him, times she has not been able to penetrate the recesses of his mind despite their connection, and times that she has feared what he is capable of. But she doesn’t have to reach into her pocket to grasp her memory crystal in order to see the way he had looked at her in the cave on Exegol. The way he had held her, and given her  _ everything _ . 

“He came back for me,” she says softly.

When she looks up, she catches something flicker across her double’s face almost imperceptibly before the sneer returns. In that moment, Rey sees the lonely little girl who had waited on Jakku for someone to return for her.

“You’re making a mistake,” the double says coldly, raising her saber. “You know I can’t let you leave here.”

They circle each other as they draw nearer to the mirror wall, to the portal Rey has sought. Here, as they approach the place that may well decide her fate, two possible futures spill out. Rey understands that this phantom sees the Sith throne as her right, as a way to ensure that her anger has not been for nothing. She understands why her double’s blade burns so brightly; why one wouldn’t have been enough.

“You don’t have to do this!” Rey says, raising her staff in defense as the double advances, slicing rapidly downward, connecting with the staff, rending it in two.

“I do,” the double chokes, turning to Rey. Her back is against the cave wall. There is nowhere left for her to go.

The blade descends again, and Rey shuts her eyes tight, but where there should be pain, there is only the sensation of her cloak being rent by the blade. She feels her belt loosened, her bag dropping to the floor. Only then does Rey realize what has happened.

“No!” she screams, diving after the bag, but the double slashes toward her with the blade again, and Rey pulls her hand back, heart hammering. The double snatches up the bag, shaking its contents across the floor. She begins to smash the holocrons with her boot, grinding their metal pieces into the floor of the cave. The Sith holocron shatters with a sickening  _ crack  _ and disintegrates.

Rey scans the floor for the Jedi holocron that should give her access to the portal, and spots it a few feet away. If she can summon it in time, she may have a chance. The double whirls in front of her, scooping it up a second before Rey can lock onto it and summon it to her hand. The double smiles and closes her fist over it.

“You see? You need me now,” she says, extinguishing her saber and dropping it to her side.

Rey doesn’t look up, but she speaks. Softly, steadily.

“I did need you once.” It’s the truth.

She has needed this version of herself, the one who has carried everything for her all this time: her anger, her rage, and her fear. She has been the possibility waiting behind every one of the choices Rey has made that have led her to this place. This version held all the hatred Rey carried for the Emperor, and the fear and anger that his blood flowed in her now. She carried the resentment that Rey felt towards the Jedi, and the fate she had never wanted. The Rey before her was always the one that could have walked out of the Sith temple on Exegol, having chosen retribution over grief or hope.

“But I don’t anymore,” she says, looking up at her double, resolute for the first time since she can remember. “You’re going to let me enter that portal.”

“I’m going to end you, so I can take the throne!” the double shouts, and Rey lunges towards her, concentrating on the holocron, pulling it to herself. The double whirls between them, and reignites her saber. Rey dodges, kneeling, and closes her eyes, pulling with everything in herself.

Suddenly there is the weight of something heavy and solid in her hand.

When Rey opens her eyes it is not the holocron in her palm, but her double’s lightsaber. The double is facing away from her, bent over, and it hits Rey that as the saber has flown through the air into her hand, it has impaled the double, incapacitating her. 

When Rey comes around to face her double, she can see that the apparition is more than incapacitated. Blood flows from a wound in her abdomen. There is shock in her face, and blood trickling from the edge of her mouth. Rey drops to her knees beside her. She puts a hand to the wound, searching for a signature of life, but the apparition grasps her hand and pushes it aside. “No,” she says, her breath coming more raggedly now.

Rey looks down at her, questioningly.

“Save it for him,” she says, and already the spark is going out of her eyes. There is something about her that looks unstable, as if she may disappear. She holds out a bloody hand to Rey and drops the holocron in her palm as the semblance of a smile flashes across her face for just a moment. “You do need me.”

Rey clutches the holocron to her chest, and reaches out to her double, cradling her head as she gasps and shudders. 

And then she changes. No longer is the figure lying there Rey, but a dark vision that rises from the floor, hissing and vaporous, and snaps at Rey even as it vanishes: a nightmare made of smoke. Rey screams as a part of her is ripped away like a bandage from a wound. It is over almost before it has begun, and when it has dissipated, Rey is once again alone in the cave, bruised and bloodied, and alone. 

Rey has never seen a Force phantom before, but the rumors of a shadow make sense to her now, and she breathes a sigh of relief, even as fear has just finished coursing through her. Rey limps towards the mirror wall once more, satisfied that the reflection staring back at her is her own.

She holds out the holocron, and for the second time closes her eyes, concentrating on it as something within it - with them both - splits open, and light pours out of the cracks. The surface of the mirror wall changes, and suddenly Rey can see something beyond it that has always been hinted at in the dark tints and reflections.

Relief floods through her being and her heart soars. Rey takes one last look at the empty cavern, and steps through.

+++

Ben steps through the portal and finds himself once again in the dark throne room in the Sith citadel: the last place he wants to be. He looks around, and sees that he is not alone.

“My boy, you have come alone,” a gravelly voice comes from the high seat, full of cold malice. “Does that mean the deed is done?”

Three guards - his former devotees, he sees - the Knights of Ren, step menacingly towards him, their faces obscured by haphazard masks. 

“If you mean the girl, I’ve taken care of her,” he says. Perhaps a lie can buy him time - can buy  _ her  _ time.

“Young Solo, I’m afraid that lies do not make for a promising start to your reign,” he cackles, and the guards are on him. Ben thrashes back, throwing one off, but two others grab him, pinning his arms behind him, holding jagged knives to his throat. “I have waited long for a worthy heir to rise, and I can wait longer still. Yet, you’ll give me the best of you before I do - or perhaps the worst. There is power in you unseen in generations, and you’ll give it to me. It’s the least you can do.”

The decrepit figure on the throne reaches out a hand, and immediately Ben cries out, his knees buckling, as a line of electricity connects them. The Emperor curls his venous hands, drawing on the life force that flows between them. He pulls it into himself, buying himself time, leaving what was once the most promising Sith lord in generations but an empty shell. Ben feels that the pain will never end, but at last it does, and he slumps to the floor, motionless, barely breathing.

“I thank you, young one, for the gift of your betrayal,” the Emperor purrs, breathing what feels like new air for the first time in years. “Throw him into the fissures,” he barks the guards, and they drag Ben Solo to the edge of the throne room where cracks in the foundation sink away in depths unseen.

Without further ceremony they heave Ben over the edge, not even pausing to watch him fall into oblivion.    
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [link text](url)   
>  [Bleeding a kyber crystal](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Bleeding)   
>  [Kef Bir](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Kef_Bir)   
>  [The mirror cave](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Mirror_cave)   
>  [Ahch-to/Temple Island](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Ahch-To)   
>  [Ezra Bridger](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Ezra_Bridger)   
>  [Ahsoka Tano](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Ahsoka_Tano)   
>  [Force phantom/Sith phantasm](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Force_phantom)   
>  [Knights of Ren](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Knights_of_Ren)


	9. Chapter Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey enters the World Between Worlds and finds the unexpected. She contemplates what will make her return to Exegol different than the first time around.

**Chapter Seven**

  
  


Rey has spent so much time focused on whether or not she’ll be able to open the portal, and almost no time imagining what things will be like once she’s inside. This, however, is certainly unexpected.

It is accurate to call this a place of Unbeing. There is no sound, no depth, none of the typical limitations of existing on a single plane at once. Rey feels flat like a sheet of parchment, and yet she can sense dimensions she hasn’t previously imagined. In this place time becomes a ribbon bending forward and then back on itself, connecting moments in ways that are more suggestion than reality.

But there is no Ben.

Leave it to the Jedi to create puzzle upon puzzle when all she seeks is a simple answer: will she be able to find Ben and bring him back? Will she even be able to tell if he has passed out of this place forever?

This place is not empty, though - far from it. Around her, moments from Rey’s own life play out in enough color and depth that she might be observing them through a doorway - one she could step right through. They are from all different stages of her life, and yet they are all gathered in this place. She begins to wonder if these are memories at all, or mere suggestions of what might have happened, or what still could. Waiting in this place are a thousand untread paths. Nothing is set in stone - everything is possible.

Looking in on each of these scenarios, Rey realizes with a jolt what this must look like to someone on the other side. She realizes then that it  _ was _ Ben that day she entered the Mirror Cave on Ahch-to, seeking answers about her family. She had thought at first it was a trick of the eyes, which she had dismissed. Yet she had seen not only a reflection of her inner struggles: another lonely, powerful being trying to find a place in the galaxy with the same questions mirrored in his eyes, the same ghosts whispering in his ear. It had been a window to this place, tangled in time.

She realizes that in real time - whatever that is - Ben had stopped peering through that portal perhaps only moments ago. Even before he knew it, Ben had been with her, drawing her into their shared trajectory. He must have awoken to a similar sense of unbeing, a wandering in this place, looking out these doors and windows at his past. A warmth rushes over Rey; a sense that she has never been alone.

And now she knows what it is she has to do. In fact, the time has almost come.

If these moments are indeed portals, there is a pause she must take in another doorway on her way back to Exegol; a message she must leave in the past if her future is to resolve itself in the way she has barely dared to hope for. Ben has told her about it, though she hasn’t recognized the reference until now. She feels energized, knowing that she is on the right track - at least the track that has brought Ben to her, filling the past in piece by piece until it brings them into the same future.

She clutches for the memory crystal in her pocket. She is almost surprised to find it there, solid, even in this place where dimensions seem to be more notion than substance.

It is easier than she imagines to find the Exegol portal from this side of this strange world between worlds. It is as if the place presents itself to her because she needs it. The gloom of the Sith temple is almost unbearable, but she has already borne it. Rey grips the stone, an anchor in time. When it is the right moment, she reaches out, more with her mind than anything. She has come this far, and there is no going back. 

+++

Ben opens his eyes. He thinks he really should be dead this time, but there is so much light - it blinds him and steals his breath. He has fallen from the crumbling citadel, and awoken somewhere else.

He looks around. This pit should be at the bottom of the cracks in the dark surface of a planet annihilated by the Sith, but here, he can see what lies beneath it. The world above is a corrupted mask slipped over something truer, and now that he has seen the heart of things, he can never go back to the dark. It will always be a shadow of this place - a lie about it.

“Ben.”

He turns, sees Rey standing there. She is clothed in white, brown hair curling in wisps around her temple where it has escaped her hood. A smile lingers on her lips. She says nothing, but holds out a hand to him, mirroring a gesture he once made to her as another throne room burned around them. If only he had known then what he was asking her to give up - that he had been tempting her close to the flame that had burned away his own wings. It seems a lifetime ago.

He takes her hand. Rises, looks around, bewildered.

“Did we…” He doesn’t finish the question. He can’t bear to think that this could be one more death - one more dream.

“Did we  _ live? _ ” Rey is all brown eyes and golden skin and sunshine. “We’re about to.”

Ben looks down at his body, which should be bruised and bleeding. He waits for the sharp pain of broken ribs as he inhales, waits for his legs to fail him as he stands, but nothing gives. Still, more than his broken body he does not know if he has the strength of will to leave this pit. It is what he deserves for the horrors he has visited on enemies of the Dark. He wants nothing more than to face the demons that have held him in their clutches all these years, and if things were different, he would have been willing to lose himself fighting back against them. But now that Rey is here, he fears losing her yet again.

“I...I don’t know if I have the strength to do this,” he falters. He wishes for her sake that he was not beyond saving. His lip quivers, and he clenches his jaw because if he releases the floodgates now, they may tear him apart. 

Rey grips his hand in one of hers, and cups his chin with the other. “You don’t have to do this alone. I’ll help you.”

He has always admired her determination; what would have broken and burned inside him as bitterness and anger propels her forward as strength, and perhaps that is the difference between them.

“What happens after we…?” he begins, wanting to believe her, believe this  _ is  _ her, believe she can be right.

“Shhh,” she says, putting a finger to his lips. She has to reach almost comically high to do so, and he is caught off guard. A smile tugs at the edges of his mouth, here in the most unlikely place of all to find anything to smile about. He has to keep himself from biting her finger, letting her trail it across his skin. “We’ll have time,” she continues. “I already told you - I’ve seen our future. Don’t you remember?”

And he does. That night Rey had reached out to him from the cliff-top hut on Ahch-to, something had revealed itself when their palms touched. Rey said it was the outline of their future, but he hadn’t wanted to believe her. But now that he sees how warped his own perceptions had been, sees that everything she told him has come to pass, he can begin to believe that there might be a world where their paths could run parallel.

He feels strangely calm, even peaceful. There is nothing for him to push back against, strike out at, and so he grasps her hand instead, pulls her to him, and is in no way concerned to find that she fades from his grasp, disintegrates into a dream from which he has recently awoken. He has done the same in her arms in this very temple, and yet here it is presenting him with another chance at a future he doesn’t deserve, but would very much like the chance to work at, to grow into - together.

He gathers himself, and finds the light has gone, and left him to the crumpled body he expected to find. But this is his chance at redemption, and the past has no hold on him as he rises, places one bloody hand on the stone wall of the pit, braces himself on one bruised leg, and  _ pulls  _ with everything in himself, ascending, hand over hand into his future.

+++

Rey doesn’t stay to watch what happens after she has delivered her message; there is no time. Or rather, there is all of time, and it has sensed that Rey has reached the end of her stay in this in-between place, and has begun to disintegrate.

“Thank you,” Rey breathes, clutching her memory crystal to her forehead, and is about to slip it back into her pocket when she stops. She has been thinking about her return to Exegol, and her one fear about it: what will be different about the moment, about  _ her,  _ that will ensure things don’t go the way they did before?

_ I am changed; I am enough,  _ she whispers fiercely to herself. And it is true. But this doesn’t stop her from considering how she should prepare.

She opens the bag she carried with her, sees her broken staff, the shattered remains of the Sith holocron that led her to the portal on Ahch-to, the broken sabers her dark double left behind, and the other artifacts she brought with her from Takodana. Here lie all the broken pieces of her past, ready for her to take up in her own time. 

And she thinks it is time to choose.

Choose and mend, as is her strength. She fishes out the handle of her staff, well worn and comfortable in her hand, but lacking its familiar heft. She spreads the pieces of the holocrons across the ground, and kneels to reconfigure them into something new. She has become resourceful as a scavenger, skilled as a scrapper with pieces of metal and stone, and gifted as a mender that can make disintegrated things whole again. It takes her next to no time to fashion a hilt, complete with a switch, and a crystal chamber borrowed from one side of her enemy’s double-bladed saber.

As she works, Rey thinks about the doorway that this act of creation marks for her, and the journey she is now committed to. The absence of her connection with the pantheon of Masters that came before now feels less like a drought, and more like a creative silence in which she is allowed to focus. This past year, as well as the events of these past few days, have given her the space to choose how  _ she  _ will shape and bend the Force, for no two Jedi have taken up the sword or the path in exactly the same way.

Rey works within the structure of her enemy’s broken saber, encasing it with her staff to make the hilt strong and the grip familiar. Each layer of her journey is represented here in the weapon she will carry with her for the rest of her days. The crystal chamber is the last thing she fashions, looking at the crimson kyber crystal lodged in the primary crystal mount of her double’s old saber. 

As it is, Rey knows that she can’t use this crystal. A weapon she has crafted will answer to her, but its aim will never be true given the amount of anger and hate that her dark double has imbued in this crystal.

On instinct, she closes her hand around the crystal mount, and shuts her eyes, drawing on the energy of the crystal the same way she did when she held her hand over Ben’s ragged chest. She feels the same energy moving through her as she did then, feeling Ben’s heart return to a steady beat, skin and sinews returning to their original, unspoiled state.

She knows that this process is typically something the Jedi meditates over for days, even weeks, but she prays that being here, outside of time, will scrub that requirement from the process. Her past, Ben’s past, and the history of the galaxy are strewn with blood and carnage, but here where they are all simultaneous and entangled, perhaps she can begin to make things whole again.

When she unclasps her hand, gasping with an effort she didn’t even realize she was expending, Rey expects to see visual proof that the crystal has been healed. In lore, this kind of thing is possible, and results in blades of white or silver. But the crystal is still red as blood. Rey’s brow furrows, and she touches the stone again, unwilling to believe it is still corrupted.

A jolt moves through her, and she sees in her mind’s eye the same kind of light that had greeted her in Palpatine’s throne room as she rose from the floor, one with the Force. Her breath comes easier. Perhaps this is the way she can carry the past with her, unchanged, but transformed. 

She removes the memory crystal from her pocket and opens tines of the focusing crystal mount, halfway between the hilt and the blade emitter shroud. “I’m coming for you,” she whispers again, slipping the crystal between the tines and closing the hilt at last. She has no need for the memory any longer.

The weapon is complete, and Rey finds the weight of it pleasing in her hand. She flips the switch, and before both hands even have time to grip the hilt, the plasma blade roars to life, golden as a desert sunrise, the two crystal beams merging into one. It lifts Rey’s heart and her spirit, and everything in her feels more alive than it has in a long time.

Now she is ready to enter a portal different from the one she has entered through, to relive the most pivotal sequence of events in her life. The past has died, and all that remains is for her to step into the future a second time. 

Rey rises, shoulders her bag, and without looking back, steps through the doorway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [How a lightsaber is made](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/114698/how-are-lightsabers-made)   
>  [Lightsaber diagram](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hho0D.jpg)   
>  [Lightsaber crystals](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Lightsaber_crystal)


	10. Chapter Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey returns to Exegol to confront the Emperor a final time, and encounters an enemy she did not expect.

**Chapter Eight**

_ “There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.” - Kazuo Ishiguro _

  
  
  
  


Rey returns with a jolt, which she realizes is her X-wing touching down on Exegol, a little more roughly than she anticipates. The sky is crackling with electricity, every bit the ominous welcome she remembers from the last time.

  
Except, there is no last time: there is only now, and what comes after.

She clambers down from the pilot’s seat, locking her gaze on the eerie green light that emanates from deep in the chasms of Exegol’s surface. She is already running toward the looming stone that hovers inexplicably over the temple’s entrance, when something flashes in her periphery.

“Ben!”

She turns towards him, only to find an empty expanse of cracked earth, shrouded in clouds and mist. Still, she knows their bond when she feels it. Her heart leaps - he has to be close.

_ Be with me, _ she wills him silently, and at last she knows he will - that he already is. But she cannot dwell on this now. There is something she needs to do first, alone, and she needs to move quickly, before she loses her nerve.

Rey ignites her saber, the golden blade severing the shroud of darkness around her. She runs through the fog towards the entrance to the citadel, teeth gritted. The entrance, anticipating her arrival, has begun to sink into the chasm below. So much of this place seems sentient and sinister. She wonders how much the Emperor waiting below knows about the journey she has undertaken, and about her plans. Rey knows exactly what hangs in the balance, and hopes that he is not the only one able to keep parts of himself shrouded in darkness.

Rey leaps into the chasm, landing on the stone dias as it drops toward the floor below. Lightning illuminates the stone faces of gargantuan Sith lords that follow her descent with unseeing eyes. 

She hops off the dias before it comes to a final rest, scanning the labyrinthine corridors that lead to the throne room. She chooses one of the paths, her saber cutting through enough of the gloom for her to see a few paces ahead. This may be her first time in its halls in this version of her life, but she has a memory of this place.

When at last the cavernous throne room appears at the end of the corridor, Rey’s head spins. It could be the run, nerves, any number of things, but this place thrums with a devastating energy, and something in her goes off like a warning bell. What if the Emperor has anticipated her arrival?

She shakes off the thought. If she is quick enough, it won’t matter anyway. 

The air is thick with the whispered ghosts of the Sith Eternal, their eerie chants reaching her ears, or perhaps penetrating directly to her mind. Rey shivers. She passes through the antechamber in which their souls are trapped forever like a living gauntlet which funnels her into the presence of the Emperor. She hurries through, glancing only momentarily at the roiling shades of Sith devotees that line the walls of this place. Were each of these unfortunates once in her shoes? Did they always plan to devote their life to the Emperor’s dark service, or were they more like her - one wrong choice away from avenging someone they had loved, returning to someone they had lost?

Rey steps at last into the throne room, unsure how she has made it this far without an encounter with Palpatine’s guards. She shakes off the thought; this is not the time for hesitation. She will not wait for the Emperor to begin his games with her - it was her hesitation that led to Ben’s demise. The last time, she let the Emperor attack first, and in falling to him, Ben had to save her. That was his undoing, and she will not put him in that position again. But she  _ is  _ surprised that she can’t see him yet, or feel him in this place...

“Well, this is a surprise,” comes the gravelly voice from the shadows. The jagged maw of the Sith throne juts up at the far end of the chamber like teeth ready to consume her. A number of figures surround it in the gloom, and as her eyes adjust, Rey can see, seated on it, the decrepit figure of the man she knows not only to be her grandfather, but the most powerful Sith in the galaxy.

Rey takes a deep breath and lifts her saber to her shoulder. The guards, which she recognizes now as the Knights of Ren, stiffen but do not advance. They have sworn fealty to a new leader, she sees, now that their old one has defected, and he is holding up a hand to stay them, at least for the moment.

“Two guests in one day!” the Emperor booms. “I have to admit, I didn’t expect to see you so soon. No matter - I’ve been waiting for this day.”

“So have I,” Rey says evenly, praying her tone doesn’t belie her racing mind. What does he mean,  _ two guests? _

“Come, come!” Palpatine beckons. “At last...you have arrived to meet your fate!” 

And Rey does take a step towards him. Though he lies bound to the throne, his voice makes him sound a thousand feet tall, and she knows the power he can expend. Still, there is no one between them for the moment. She could strike, end him now before the guards have a chance to react. She takes another step closer, but she feels stuck, like she is underwater.

“I sense a hesitation in you, child,” the Emperor says, an impatient edge in his voice.  _ Where is Ben? _ He should be here by now, and she realizes she is waiting for him, but when she tries to reach out, she feels...nothing.

“Were you expecting someone else?” Palpatine sneers, and Rey feels that she can no longer hide her thoughts. She lets him in, and in exchange reaches out to her surroundings. Something sinister turns her stomach.

“What have you done with him?” Rey shouts. “What have you done with Ben?”

“I don’t know who you mean,” the Emperor growls, but the wicked curl of his lip is evident, though his eyes are shrouded in his dark hood. “If you mean young Solo, he took another name long ago.”

Something moves in the shadows near the base of the throne. A figure steps into the watery light filtering down from overhead, and his features take on a familiar shape that turns Rey’s heart to ice.

_ It can’t be. _

“Ben?”

She says his name again, but now it feels like a rock in her throat. Is it possible that using the portal to return has brought her back into some alternate reality where he never gave up his mask? What if all of this  _ is _ a massive trap, and her phantom double was right to warn her?

Ben nods coolly in her direction, but barely looks her in the eye. The Knights are scattered about the room, but he doesn’t appear to be under any compulsion. Rey looks from his face to the Emperor’s and back. She tries to reach out with the bond to see if this is a ruse, or if he is being manipulated, but all she runs into is emptiness.

“Ben, what are you doing?” she asks him, drawing slowly closer. His robes are cleaner, newer than she remembers. He is more Supreme Leader than fallen Jedi.  _ No,  _ she grits her teeth, refusing to believe it. How can she have been so wrong about his intentions?

“I have to admit this is not the reunion I had imagined,” Palpatine booms down at them. “When I surveyed the galaxy to determine the heir to my throne, I was impressed by the promise in young Solo. But the Force had other plans,” he snarls, his gaze resting on Rey.

“You demonstrated an unexpected power I could not ignore,” the Emperor continues. “I thought it both a shame and a boon that the Rule of Two is clear - there can only be one Sith master and one apprentice - only one of you could ascend. I had spent years whispering to young Ben, sending him mentors to aid him in his ascent. But when I saw that a girl, still young and untrained, could best the monster known as Kylo Ren, it occurred to me that it would make each of you stronger if I were to pit you against each other - hence the bridging of your minds. Still, both of you have disappointed me.”

Ben’s chin juts out stubbornly. Rey can tell the comment has cut him the way the disappointment of his superiors has always driven him forward, with a gnawing hunger to be enough.

“Ben, don’t listen to him!” Rey shouts. “You’ve seen his lies for what they are. Don’t do this!” She searches his expression for any signs of wavering. After all, this is not the first time they’ve entered a throne room at cross-purposes, only to join forces in the end. But he doesn’t seem to even hear her.

“There is conflict in both of you that disturbs me,” the Emperor drawls on. “The ruler of the Sith must be of singular mind. You,” he says turning to Rey. “You showed so much potential, even from a young age. The way you used your anger as a weapon, even from such a young age, made me question my certainty that young Solo would one day take my throne. But in the end, the pull to the Light has always been too strong. Still, you did marvels by driving young Solo to confront his demons, and allowing him to defeat them one by one. But you,” he says, turning to Ben, “though you are powerful, you refuse to heal the wound that rends you. You swore to me that your loyalty was undivided, and yet, the girl lives!”

“Ben, don’t listen to him!” Rey shouts again. “He’s giving you a false choice. We can defeat him, together!”

“Still you let her tempt you!” the Emperor roars.  _ “She  _ is the thorn in your side, diverting your mind, diverting your power. Kill her now, if you still wish to ascend!”

Rey ignores him, and speaks only to Ben.

“The last time I walked into this throne room I thought I was alone, but then you came to help me. You showed me I was wrong. At once I was One with the Force, with all the Jedi who came before, and I saw that I was part of something bigger.” She smiles, but tears spill from the corners of her eyes.

“You asked me to rule with you once before, and I said no, because then, we didn’t understand. I was afraid of who I might become, and you - well, you  _ still  _ believe you have to choose - the Light side or the Dark. You think that giving in to your power will make you feel finally that you are  _ enough.  _ Ben, don’t you see? It’s the wrong question. The Force isn’t some weapon to be wielded or a power to be controlled. It’s a way of seeing that we are already connected - that we’re together. If you go this way, you’ll be lost forever, but you don’t have to be. We can still walk out of here, together. We’ve done it before!”

“Silence!” the Emperor shouts, and sends a bolt of lightning from his hand that knocks Rey on her back. The breath goes out of her suddenly, and she nearly loses her grip on her saber, which extinguishes.

She rolls quickly to a sitting position, but Ben remains rooted to the spot, several paces away. She looks at him, pleading, as she rises, and turns to the Emperor, re-igniting her saber. “You don’t know him,” she says. “He’s changed, and together we’ll defeat you. Without him, I would have never known that  _ I  _ was your rightful heir, but I’ve learned that blood means nothing. I’ll never take this throne,” she spits. “And neither will he.”

Palpatine begins to laugh, and it catches her off guard. It builds from somewhere deep within him and grows to an uproarious boom that fills the chamber. “Oh, child, do not mistake me. I may have foolishly considered you for my purposes at one time, but you are no heir of mine.” He is practically writhing in his seat.

“You called me your heir,” Rey says, confusion written in her furrowed brow. She looks first at the Emperor, but then realizes that in another life, he was not the first to tell her that she shared a bloodline with the Sith.

Her gaze shifts to Ben, hurt and disbelief pooling in her eyes. He looks away, again. This, more than anything angers her. They are not in the habit of hiding from each other, and she wants to face him openly, but suddenly everything between them is cut off, and nothing makes sense.

“You are the daughter of penniless scrappers,” the Emperor scoffs. “They sold you for drinking money and left you in that forsaken desert, Jakku. Though I can see why this lie might throw confusion on your path, you are no more my blood heir than he is.”

Rey is reeling, but despite the notion that the whispers from her childhood  _ have  _ come from somewhere beyond her, and somewhere darker, the darkest revelation is Ben’s lie. He  _ knows  _ that the question of her identity has always haunted her. It is what brought them face-to-face on Ahch-to, both in the mirror cave, and on the clifftops - both of them desired a place where they could belong. Rey had begun to think it didn’t matter, especially when she was with Ben.

It had been easy for her, then, to believe him when he had tempted her with the answers. She had suffered the blow of learning she had Sith in her blood like it was a truth she had been denying rather than a cleverly laid trap. It had confirmed all her fears about what she might become, making her all the more hesitant to become the galaxy’s last Jedi master. She had denied her own strength to follow that path, instead finding ways to push all her darkness down where it couldn’t hurt anyone.

“Ben, tell me the truth.” She turns to him, pleading, searching his face for any kind of sign. “Did you lie to me? Did you tell me I’m someone that I’m not?”

“I did what I had to do to put an end to the Jedi,” he says sullenly.

A tear courses down her cheek, but Rey wipes it away - he doesn’t deserve it.  _ What kind of monster casts no shadow?  _ The question from her childhood is in her ear again, and now she knows whose voice has asked it. The anger inside her is breaking open, and she wants to obliterate this nightmare. In this forsaken place, she could stand to become the monster. There is no shadow when  _ everything  _ is darkness.

“The time has come,” the Emperor says, turning to the Supreme Leader who was once Ben. “ _ Choose _ .”

Ben kneels in fealty, and a cruel smile spreads over his face. “Master, I brought her here so that you could witness my loyalty.” He rises and slips his lightsaber - that terrible, unstable, cross-guard saber - from his belt and ignites it. 

“Ben! Please tell me you remember what I told you. Don’t you remember? I’ve seen how this ends, and so have you.”

At last Ben meets her gaze, and when he does, his lip curls into a sardonic grin, and hope leeches from Rey’s being like water dripping through her fingers.

“You put far too much faith in your visions,  _ scavenger. _ ”

Before Rey can react, he has leapt towards her, slashing at her with the cross-guard saber, fueled by that old unbridled anger, in a fervor too intent to be a ruse. She parries, but not before the red blade catches the very edge of her shoulder and draws first blood.

Rey raises her saber in response, knowing exactly how Kylo tends to duel. She has fought him many times, after all, and observed him still more often through the bond. She knows the frenetic Vapaad style he prefers, feels the hum of the blade before it arrives, and so she swipes low, aiming for his legs, trying to beat him to the punch.

Instead, he leaps backward, swinging his blade wildly, creating a space around him into which she cannot penetrate. He uses Soresu to lay a trap, protecting himself while holding her at bay.

It’s all wrong.

Rey knows that for her and Ben, combat is nothing new. It has been an integral part of their complicated duet. As often as they have listened to each other, they have lashed out, dueled, hurt each other in a dozen different ways. Violent as it is, it has given them a way to learn each other’s tics and tokens. No matter how many times they have fought, they have always walked away knowing more about the other. Over time, fighting has become just another way of letting their guard down.

Ben is a relentless and physical opponent; he would sooner suffer an injury himself than step away from an assailant he could best. This is not the way Ben fights.

_ This is not Ben at all. _

Rey realizes it with a burst of rage that propels her forward, into the orbit of that cruel cross-guard saber - the one that should be at the bottom of the sea on Kef Bir.

“You  _ liar!”  _ she screams, and it is directed at both the Emperor, and this imposter. She draws her blade back and lets it fly, thrusts it in between arcs of the red saber, thrusts it between his ribs, and drives it home. An inhuman sound of rage and anguish escapes from her lips, and she falls to her knees as he crumples opposite her...then disintegrates into a cloud of black smoke and ash, and disappears.

Rey wants to sob, wants to scream, but most of all she wants to wake up. She is flooded with relief that she has guessed correctly, but gutted that she has fallen for the same trick twice. She has returned to this place in hopes of latching onto a concrete future. She wants more than anything to end her obsession with what might have been, yet all she finds are phantoms.

“My dear, who is the monster now?” Palpatine cackles from behind her, and Rey tenses, but remains crouched, staring at the empty spot where the ghost of Ben has disappeared.

“Where is he?” she says coldly, still not turning to face him. Her heart pounds, the sense of dread from earlier returning.

“What does it matter? After all you’ve been through, he’s left you alone.”

“He wouldn’t do that!”

“But what if he did? What if everything his phantom said was the truth? What if they were memories I preserved to show you who he truly was, before it was too late? Would you take the throne then?”

“Is this a game to you?” Rey says, rising, turning slowly to face him. “Do you think after everything you’ve done that I would consider it even for a minute? You’ve lied to us even while we’re standing here - your empire is  _ built  _ on lies! I want no part of it.”

“My child,” the Emperor says in a chilling tone, “What will you do when you walk out of here, I wonder? Where will your anger go? I have seen it growing in you like a shadow. It has sown seeds of doubt that will keep you from the Light. This darkness is who you are now, and who you’ve always been. This is the only place for you to change it into power! I tried to tell you years ago - I asked you what kind of monster  _ you  _ wanted to become.”

“You have never cared for a moment what I think,” Rey says, and she is walking towards him now, slowly but steadily. “But I will tell you anyway. I think that you’re afraid.”

The emperor cackles from his throne, but it is a hollow, mirthless sound.

“I think that you have been so concerned with choosing an heir because you know that your strength is failing, and that soon you will die. You see your empire coming to an end, and you’ll do anything to steal a few more years, or to choose someone to be your puppet or your pawn. But Ben wouldn’t do that, and neither will I.”

Rey ignites her saber, and immediately two guards rush her. She sweeps one aside with little effort, impaling him with the saber, knocking him out of her path. The second one swings at her with a heavy sawtooth scythe that she slices through with a backhanded slash, removing the blade. He counters, using the handle as a cudgel. It connects with Rey’s left arm, connecting with the bone, but she grits her teeth and spins her saber overhead in her right hand, catching him in an unprotected thigh. He keels over, and she steps over him, moving closer to the throne.

And here Rey feels something she does not expect. As she stalks closer to the Emperor, intent on final vengeance, she reaches out - whether out of desperation or a tug in her subconscious, she can’t be sure.

To her amazement, a familiar calm washes over her, shrouding her in warmth like the dying rays of a familiar sun. For a moment in the midst of this nightmare she feels peace and clarity.

She looks up at the Emperor, and she smiles.

He stops mid-laugh, and Rey pauses, looking at him with something like pity. She knows the evil power he possesses, but at this moment, blinded by his malice, she sees the fear that has reduced him to this wraith-like form. 

_ What kind of monster casts no shadow?  _ She can hear his voice in her ears, even now. But he has been asking the wrong questions. This is a riddle with more than one answer.

“No monster,” Rey says, and he looks at her in confusion. “There can be no shadow if there is no monster. I am no monster. And you...well, you can try to wipe us both out, but as much as you may want to, you can’t live forever.”

And whether it is her tone, or his confusion, or his anger at being pitied, Palpatine turns the full of his rage on her, on her saber, on this golden ray of light which doesn’t belong to this place. “You fool!” he screams. “You could never rule this galaxy; your mind is divided, and you are living in the past. You are a failure; you are nothing!”

He launches a Force blast, which Rey absorbs with her saber, this concentrated extension of herself that she has created and imbued with power. Lightning explodes from his hand and connects with that golden blade.

Rey holds off the attack for a minute, taking the brunt of it, but when she senses it is time, she turns away from the heat, closes her eyes, and hopes she has read the signs correctly; that she is making the right decision. She extinguishes the saber, breaking away from the stream of energy, and pulls back her right hand. She turns away from the throne, and faces the fissures at the far end of the room, throwing the saber with all her might towards those cracks leading to oblivion.

The Emperor leans forward, following its arc in disbelief, watches it sail towards oblivion. It dips downward, but just when it is about to disappear, a bloodied hand emerges from the depths and catches it mid-flight, saves it from the depths, ignites it as he rises.

Ben Solo emerges from the chasm, broken and bleeding, but breathing nonetheless.

He drags himself up out of the precipice, and struggles to his feet. Rey looks on, eyes wide in awe; the Emperor is dumbfounded. Ben draws himself up to full height with some effort, but the fire in his eyes leaves little mistake - he is very much alive.

“You’re wrong,” he shouts across the room, chest heaving with effort, anger, adrenaline. He moves into an offensive stance with the saber, poised to strike. “She. Is.  _ Everything! _ ”

The guards are on him in an instant, but Ben Solo is a new man, recently back from the dead, and does not plan to return anytime soon. He makes short work of the two guards nearest him, finding the energy to knock both of them into the chasm with the help of the Force after he has struck the initial blows with the saber.

Another two are close behind, and he is less lucky this time - they are swinging rusty, blunt weapons, and one of them catches him on the thigh, and another one just above his elbow. He works in a tight circle, drawing them closer to him, and when they are within striking distance he ducks, allowing one to injure the other. He places a well-timed boot to the chest of the first, knocking him over the edge of the fissure, and whirls, bringing the saber upright as he checks his bearings.

Just in time, Ben tosses the saber back to Rey, as a number of guards emerge from the shadows - where have they all been? - and head towards her, weapons drawn. She is both overjoyed to see that Ben - the real Ben,  _ her  _ Ben - is back, and supremely angry at the Emperor, which is to say, she is at the height of her power. The guards are merely inconveniences between the two of them, and she enters into the fray as they move to attack her, but one by one she thwarts them, sidesteps them, dispatches them with her golden saber. 

And at last there is no one left between them, and Rey is standing at the base of the throne, alone.

“You may think that you have won, but I can assure you that you will not leave this place,” the Emperor says coldly, struggling to stand. 

“Rey!” Ben shouts, and she turns to see him pinned against the far wall by a guard who has stabbed him in the shoulder, and is raising his ragged knife for a death blow. Without a thought, she tosses him the saber, and he impales the guard, and then a second who has appeared behind him. Free for the moment, he looks to toss the saber back to her, but as Rey turns back to the Emperor, he attacks her with all the energy he can muster.

Rey falls onto her back, staring up at the aperture in the ceiling. She reaches out, grasping for the saber, but can’t reach it. She is rooted to the spot, her entire body convulsing. She can raise her head enough to see the Emperor’s angry eyes boring into her, full of hateful intent.

Rey reaches into her depths, looks for the strength to fight back, but she can feel herself fading, just like the last time.

_ No, no no! Not now! _

And then, Ben is there, next to her, reaching into the storm of electricity between them, handing her the saber. He is taking on part of the attack, absorbing it, shifting it away from her.

“Ben!” She screams, trying to take the saber from him. “I have to do this alone!”

“Don’t be foolish!” he shouts, and keeps one hand on the saber, sliding the other around her waist.

“I can’t lose you again!” Rey shouts, but sweat is pouring down her forehead. She doesn’t have long. Palpatine cackles, only increasing the fury of his attack, holding her steady in the plasma beam raining down on them. 

“You won’t lose me,” he says. “I’m here. I’m with you.”

Rey feels along the edge of the saber for the switch, and hits it with her thumb, feels it flash to life. At the same time, she feels strong arms pulling her upright, like a rag doll. The saber blazes golden through the cold white lightning, and before she knows what is happening, Rey feels that she can breathe. She can stand.

Luke and Leia’s sabers had been conductors, shields to her, but this blade is her own, and it is part of her. She leans into the hail of golden sparks and stumbles forward into it.

Not only is she withstanding the attack, but she is moving toward the throne. The Emperor can’t believe what he is seeing. How is this girl able to resist his power?

They remain locked together - the Emperor fighting for his very existence, and Ben and Rey against him, a dyad, clinging to the weapon fueled by both anger and memory. Sparks shower down from the place where the beams of energy collide, and as the resistance between them intensifies, a crack splits the base of the throne, and travels through the walls of the room, up through the ceiling. 

The ceiling of the citadel opens, far above them, and there, arrayed in the sky like stars and almost as numerous, is a motley fleet of ships from every corner of the galaxy, from every world that opposes the darkness emanating from this place, and tears stream down Rey’s face. It is more than she could have ever hoped.

At last, the Emperor can sustain his rage no longer, and the stream of energy is broken. Rey is visibly flagging, but still she rises, steps towards him. She takes the saber in her hand, steps away from Ben. This is what she has come for. She looks at this decrepit wraith of a man, small and alone on his throne, and sees that for the first time there is real fear in his eyes.

She does not relish her task, but she raises the saber, prepared to strike. At the last moment the Emperor cries out and unleashes another bolt of energy from his hands, striking the blade. The blade absorbs it, and burns like a firebrand made from energy both sinister and hopeful. Rey drives it down, down into the throne, towards the monster who sits on it, ready to end him, and wake them from this nightmare.

As she does so, the Emperor gives a pitiful scream and dissipates like one of his phantoms, having given the last of himself to this final attack. The blade collides with an empty seat, shattering the throne of the Sith, destroying it.

The corridor Rey entered through begins to shudder, and the souls of the Sith Eternal cry out as the place they are anchored is destroyed. They dissipate upward, and their chants and anguished groans give way to silence. 

Rey looks back at the crumbling throne, which falls away as she stumbles backwards into Ben’s arms. A blinding light replaces the eternal gloom of this place, flashes around her, becomes her only reality. She barely knows whether she is herself.

As stones fall around her, Rey falls to her knees, sheltering her head with her hands. She scrunches her eyes shut, barely daring to believe what has transpired. She begins to feel the pain of her wounds at the same time that she feels a great weight lifted off her chest, as if her past has finally left her.

The first thing she sees when she opens her eyes is a solid, bleeding hand in hers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Lightsaber combat and combat styles](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Lightsaber_combat/Legends)


	11. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey and Ben leave Exegol behind and work out what their future may hold. Sexy times ensue.

**Epilogue**

  
  


_ “I think we deserve a soft epilogue, my love. We’re good people, and we’ve suffered enough.”  _

_ \- nikka ursula, We Sleep, and Maybe We’ll Wake Up _

  
  
  


The temple cascades down around them, and Rey buries her face in Ben’s torn cardigan. Something rumbles from the core of the planet, as if this world itself knows that its purpose is expired. Overhead, Sith ships explode like fireworks, and the Emperor’s fleet rains down on Exegol’s starved surface like sparks from a dying fire. Ben wraps an arm around her, and holds her tight against him until it’s over.

It takes Rey a moment to realize that the Emperor is gone, the battle is done, and they are - both of them - still alive and breathing.

When she does finally step away from him, she keeps her bloody hands in his. Neither of them speaks, but at last each seems satisfied that the other is solid, and that they are  _ together. _

Only then does Ben’s face break into that radiant smile, and Rey lets herself dissolve into it. This is what has sustained her night after night. It is the anchor around which she has formed the memory crystal now at the heart of her blade. In a way, it has guided her to this moment.

She kisses him then, suddenly, passionately, and every phantom and weight she has been holding on to rolls off her shoulders. Her eyes close, their foreheads touch, and she feels her hands in his hair, his hands on her waist.

It is the mirror of what, in another time, was their last kiss, but here it is their first. It is a memory of a dream, but she does not need them any longer now that Ben is here, and they will grow smaller and smaller with every kiss that comes after.

  
  


+++   
  
  


From the beginning, life with Ben is right, but it’s not perfect.

The first thing they have to decide together is where to go next. They need to get off Exegol fast, and neither of them has a home to return to, exactly. For Rey, Ajan Kloss had always been a temporary refuge, and since childhood, Ben has never had a residence that he prefers to return to.

They climb into Ben’s TIE Silencer, the larger of their respective crafts, still undecided.

“I’m sorry I don’t have a better idea,” Rey says as she mounts the wing of the Silencer and crawls into the seat behind the cockpit. “I wasn’t even sure we’d make it out of here.”

“Don’t worry,” Ben says, clasping her hands in his before turning to the navigation and cranking the craft to life. “Now that I think about it, my mother always tried to get me to come with her to this summer cottage on Naboo. She said it had belonged to my grandmother.”

There is a far-away look in his eye as he mentions his mother, and Rey puts a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “I’m sure it’s still there,” he says, turning back to the controls. “Maybe we could start there, until we think of something better.”

Rey nods, and he sets a course for the Mid Rim. She doesn’t spare Exegol a last look as they enter hyperspace. It becomes a ruin in the black depths of the Unknown Regions, and Rey hopes she has set foot on it for the last time.

+++

As they cruise towards Naboo, Rey sends a transmission to the Resistance telling them that she is alive, but that she needs some time to recover from the battle. Before long, Poe responds, telling her to take all the time she needs.

She smiles and leans back in her seat and closes her eyes. It’s a bittersweet thing to be on her own now. She has lost a year, and she is not quite sure what to do with that time. There will be no jubilant homecoming this time, no hero’s welcome.

While Rey is grateful not to be the focus of raucous mess hall drinking party toasts, she also longs to see her friends. She knows it may well be a long time before she can hug Finn, Poe, or Rose again. She isn’t sure her friends will embrace Ben as she has, though, but she can’t imagine parting from him. She is grateful for some time to think, and to revel in simply being alive.

They descend onto a worn landing pad near a small village market as late afternoon sun bathes the hills of Naboo. Rey looks around in wonder. If Takodana had been a green paradise, Naboo is one of golden grass and lakes that reflect soft grey skies. There are mountains in the distance, and against them rise impressive domed towers that Ben realizes must belong to Varykino, the private retreat of the Naberries. His grandmother had spent her summers at the retreat before becoming queen, or so his mother told him.

They ask a merchant about Padmé Naberrie’s old summer cottage, and he confirms that yes, it still sits across the meadow from Varykino, out past the edge of town. He warns them that it has sat empty for years now, and he can’t guarantee they will find it in good condition. He glances skeptically at the Silencer, which stands out like a great, sharp metal spider in a landscape where everything is pastel tones and soft edges. Still, he says they can park it there for a small fee, and points them to a supply store where they stock up on food and a few other necessities.

+++

The cottage is indeed in a bit of a shambles, but luckily still structurally intact. It is small, but Rey can tell that it was grand once. There are large trees with dangling tendril-like branches in the yard that spread over a well and sprawling porch. She and Ben use the last few hours of sunlight to get the well pump in the yard working, remove all the empty remains of rodents’ nests from the interior, and clear the rooms of most of the furniture, which is crumbling into kindling.

Rey goes about dispatching grime and cobwebs while Ben mumbles and curses as he tampers with the fireplace, opening the flue and checking whether the chimney will function properly. Rey finds a kettle with no holes in it and boils some water. She uses some to polish a ceramic basin that she finds on the sideboard, and polishes it before filling it with the rest of the steaming water.

“Here,” she says, handing Ben a rag. “We should clean up before we do much else; at least get the blood off.”

He rises from the fireplace and nods silently, pulling the black shirt over his head without a word. She gasps, seeing how badly beaten and bloodied he is - the dark fabric has hidden it well. She doesn’t know how he has gone on with the rest of his day without attending to the wounds. She takes the rag she had meant to use for herself and dips it into the basin, approaching him with an unspoken question in her eyes.

He nods, and she does her best to clean the cuts and bruises without causing further pain. When the blood is gone, she holds a gentle hand to his skin and closes her eyes. The cuts grow smaller until she can barely see where they crossed his back and chest.

She steps away, and realizes she has been holding her breath. She lets it out and realizes how tense she has been this entire time. It has been so long since she could relax - she isn’t exactly sure how to do it. Ben turns to face her, and suddenly wraps her up in his arms. He holds her for a long time like that in silence. When he finally lets her go, there are tears in his eyes.

+++

As night falls, Ben builds a fire with the remains of an unfortunate chair that didn’t make the cut, and Rey fishes two containers of Gungan stew from their bags - officially a chief export of the region. She uncorks a bottle of local wine and presents the meal to Ben with a fanfare it possibly doesn’t deserve.

There are not many places to sit, but Rey has pummeled the dust from the blankets on the bed with a fervor that makes Ben chuckle. Rey had broken into a grin when she realized it was the first time she’d heard him laugh. They settle onto the mattress with their dishes, faces bathed in soft firelight. It’s nothing special, but they realize that neither of them can remember the last time they ate.

It is the best meal they have ever eaten. 

Ben slurps down the stew, realizes the ridiculous sounds he’s making, and smiles. It is the most carefree she has seen him, and she can’t stop watching the expressions he makes, peering over to see which foods from their stockpile he prefers. She notices that he holds his pinky out unconsciously as he sips the wine, and has to keep herself from laughing. There are a thousand tiny things about him that she wants to know, and now there is time to learn them.

Even weeks ago this would have seemed unimaginable, and yet if she has learned anything from the events of the past few days, it is that all futures are possible. Rey sighs and looks out the window. Soft greys and pinks flood the sky as the sun sinks behind the distant mountains. She wishes they could stay here forever.

Ben is not one for conversation, but as the wine disappears they find each other more comfortable in the other’s presence, and the smiles and words come more freely. After conversing through the bond, the mechanics of body language and proximity are a new endeavor to navigate. Rey thinks that Ben leans closer to her as they talk, and she finds ways to let her hand linger near his on top of the sheets. Once, Ben’s fingers brush hers as he reaches for the bottle, and she thinks he lets them linger there a few moments longer than he has to. She doesn’t mind.

The fire crackles and a chill creeps into the room, and they realize how bone-tired they both are. There are two empty bottles of wine sitting at the foot of the bed by the time they finish, and though the fire is dying in the hearth, they are both warm. The mattress is a bit musty, but anything will do at this point. Rey kicks off her boots, and Ben stands, stretching his lanky arms towards the ceiling and yawning. He pulls the comforter from the bed and stares dubiously at a chair near the fireplace that barely looks like it could support his frame.

“What are you doing?” Rey asks, moving the rest of their dishes to a sideboard near the window and circling back towards the bed. 

“I thought I would let you have the bed. What are  _ you  _ doing?”

He turns to find that she is pulling her Alderaanian capelet over her head. Once white, it is now discolored and torn from the fight. The firelight falls on entire constellations of freckles he has never seen before. He stares for just a moment too long before turning back to face the fire, red creeping into his ears. He finds his grip on the comforter has turned his knuckles white.

“I’m not going to sleep in this, it’s caked in blood and sweat,” Rey says, wrinkling her nose. He hears another article of clothing drop to the floor, which can only be her breeches. “And don’t be ridiculous. You’re going to sleep right here, with me.” He hears the mattress creak as she slides under the sheets. 

When he turns back, she is fiddling with the last of her leather arm bands, which she drops on the floor along among the rest of her clothes. He takes a step towards the bed, and swallows what feels like a rock in his throat. Warmth floods through him, and he can’t tell if it’s the wine or the blood that seems to be pulsing through him at twice the normal rate. He spends a long time unclasping the buckles on his boots before kicking them off, and climbing into the bed, fully clothed.

Rey looks at him, amused. “You’re not going to sleep like that, are you?” she asks, snuggling into her pillow, shooting him a dubious look. He huddles an arm’s length away, struggling to find words that won’t sound ridiculous. Sitting together on  _ top  _ of the sheets is one thing. He wouldn’t mind if both of them were  _ beneath  _ the sheets, nothing but skin separating them, but navigating into this situation has never been his strong suit.

“I didn’t want to assume…” he mutters, suddenly finding his pillowcase very intriguing. He pulls at the threads at its hem.

“Ben,” she says seriously, closing the space between them, looking directly into his dark eyes. “Do you think your grandparents made love in this bed?”

“Rey!” Ben snorts and rolls his eyes, and she grins from ear to ear. His grandfather has been his hero for long years, and has heard nothing but good things about his stately, beautiful, and sometimes formidable grandmother. But he doesn’t want to think about them now. Not... _ that way. _

“There are a lot of things we’ve been worried about,” she says more seriously, rubbing the tension from his neck. “Sharing a bed should not be one of them. We know everything else about each other. You shouldn’t have to worry.”

“Not  _ everything,”  _ he says, arching an eyebrow in her direction. He makes an effort to relax, and traces her arm with one of his fingers. There are nights he has thought about this very scenario, and he’s  _ fairly  _ sure he’s been able to keep those from her, but he wonders now. 

“Relax,” she smiles, and curls into him. “I want you,” she says earnestly. “Here. With me.”

“I want you too,” he whispers into her hair. Something in her touch does the trick for him, and he melts into the mattress, into the shape of her. There are a thousand things he would like to do, but now that they have all the time in the world, he is content to start with the small ones. He tugs the messy knots of her hair free from their ties, runs his fingers through it, massages her scalp.

Rey sighs happily, and Ben dares steal a look at her, the blankets dipping dangerously low on her shoulder.  _ Stars, she’s beautiful.  _

The bond has allowed them to see inside each other’s minds, and perhaps each other’s souls. But their bodies are foreign countries, and despite their exhaustion, they find the awareness to explore every inch of uncharted territory with slow fascination. They revel in the warmth of skin on skin, and the headiness of it spurs their exploration. If there are any mysteries that remain, they investigate with curious fingers and tongues, and when they finally know the right questions to ask, they ask them again and again and again, until the answers come.

When at last sleep takes them, they lie tangled together, spent and satisfied. It is perhaps the happiest they have ever been.

+++

And still, even here, the nightmares come.

Rey jolts suddenly awake, disoriented and breathless. Shreds of the images remain. It is the same dream that came to her on Ajan Kloss: the forest, the younglings, the monster.  _ The monster that is her.  _ She calms her breathing, and Ben sits up beside her, puts an arm around her shoulders.

“Rey?” he mumbles sleepily. “It’s alright; it’s just a dream.”

She shakes her head, looks around her. The pre-dawn light is starting to filter through the windows of the cottage, but her heart is sinking. She thought she would be safe here. With everything that’s happened, it is like a punch to the gut that the dark dreams haven’t stopped.

“Ben, I have to ask you something.”

He nods, his hand brushing the nape of her neck, stroking her hair. “What is it?”

“In the hangar bay, on Kijimi,  _ you  _ told me that I’m a Palpatine. That wasn’t just something the Emperor’s phantom said. Is it true?”

Ben stops rubbing her neck and sits in silence for a moment. The room is dark, and she wishes she could see the expression on his face. 

“I don’t know,” he says gravely, his brow wrinkling. “He told me it was true; I saw it in a vision. But you know that he can easily create those kinds of deceptions. If I’m honest, it seems like a lie that he would use to goad you into fighting me for the throne so he could choose between two viable heirs. But I can’t be sure.”

Rey nods, but the explanation doesn’t calm her. Despite the horror of the throne room, there had been a moment of relief when all the lies were peeled away, and the weight of a Sith birthright had been lifted from her shoulders. But now she isn’t sure.

Ben gets up and stokes the fire. He is stiff and only half-awake, but he sees that Rey is troubled, and when he returns to the bed, he takes her hand in his.

“Look at me,” he whispers, and Rey does. Her heart skips a beat at the intensity of his wild eyes. Even in repose, a fire burns in Ben. She doesn’t believe that he could do anything half-heartedly, and now that he has abandoned the First Order, this gives her hope.

“It doesn’t matter who your family is,” he insists. “You are  _ you,  _ and you’ve proven over and over that you’re stronger than whatever doubts you have about your future. You’re the one who told me the Force isn’t something to be suppressed or feared. Whatever is in your future, you will be able to make the right choice when the time requires it. Don’t be afraid of what you’ve seen - they’re just dreams.”

Rey nods, and looks out the window towards the mountains. Light is just beginning to appear over their peaks. She leans against Ben and watches the sky change colors.

“It was the younglings again, wasn’t it?” Ben asks at length, and she nods. She thinks of all the children scattered across the galaxy that the Resistance has yet to rescue. It doesn’t matter that the Emperor is gone - a new darkness will always rise. It is the way of things.

“We have to do something for them,” Rey muses. “They’re vulnerable now. Perhaps I’m to suggest that the Resistance help them this time. It will be my role to train them, after all.” She nuzzles Ben’s shoulder as she feels that bittersweet tug at her heart again. Where will Ben be if she takes that path?

“Your friends in the Resistance probably aren’t too eager to see me,” Ben murmurs, as if reading her thoughts.

“No, probably not,” Rey admits. “But they’ve been through some pretty unbelievable things this past year. You might be surprised what they can accept.”

Ben considers this, and gets up to move about the room. “Did we pick up caf yesterday? I can’t remember.” He rummages through their provisions until he finds a packet. 

Rey’s mind is still working, putting pieces together. “You could help me!” she says suddenly. “Help me train the younglings.” It’s crazy, but it might work.

Ben snorts indignantly as he picks up the kettle from the sideboard, and pours it full of well water from the bucket they brought in the night before. “I’d like to see you pitch that idea. Can you imagine Poe or any of them allowing me anywhere  _ near  _ the Resistance base, let alone the apprentices?”

“There could be good reason, though,” Rey says. “You know all the tricks of the dark side that they will have to recognize and defend themselves against. You know every combat style there is. You have a working knowledge of all the Sith-sympathetic networks in the galaxy at this point. Think of the potential for protecting them with that kind of knowledge. And remember - I’ll be the only Master they’ve got. I have a say in my training methods. Think about it!”

Ben stokes the fire and adds the kettle before he says anything. “Rey, you know I would do anything to help you. But it’s not going to be easy. We’ve been through a lot, and it’s going to take time to learn new patterns, to gain broken trust. Not everyone is as forgiving as you are.”

“We’ll start here,” she says, and he turns from the fire, looks at her.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean - if I’m to become a Master, I need an apprentice. I need to practice. And  _ you  _ need a teacher.”

“I need a teacher, do I?” he asks, arching an eyebrow in her direction as he empties the packet of caf grounds into a cannister.

“Well, you know a lot about the  _ Force, _ ” Rey says. “But you need to unlearn the ways of using it that you learned from the Sith. I’m sure your training with Luke only went so far.” She is out of bed now, pacing by the window.

“It did,” Ben says bitterly, “but beyond what he taught me, there are a lot of things about the Jedi order that are just too...binary. Too  _ skewed. _ I don’t know if I can give myself to that…”

“We have everything we need,” Rey says, putting her hands on his shoulders - or trying. He is so  _ tall.  _ She settles for sliding her hands over his chest, resting them on his hips before pulling him into a hug. When she steps back, she looks up into his face. “We have the texts. We have a saber -  _ you  _ need a saber! - and you said yourself - the Force is a way of seeing, of living. We choose how to use it. We can choose together.”

He sighs, leaning back against the sideboard, watching the caf brew. After a while he shakes his head. “I’m with you,” he says. “For better or worse. I’m not promising it will be perfect. And we have a lot to work out. I don’t know what this is going to look like, or if it will work. But if we have anything now, it’s time.”

Rey nods. “We do have time.” 

“Here,” Ben hands her a cup of caf, and they settle into the blankets. The future can wait for a bit. Cross-legged, they lean against each other and stare out the window across the meadow outside the cottage.

The sun has risen over the mountaintops now, and the sky is a cheerful periwinkle. The branches of the trees in the yard outside whisper to each other, and far away she can hear the sound of a waterfall. Everything seems peaceful, and the vastness of the sky, the grandeur of the mountains, the comfort of their companionship makes everything that could compromise it seem smaller.

They sip their drinks, waking fully to the new day. By the time the sun is high, the last shreds of Rey’s nightmare have burned away, until they are not even a memory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [TIE Silencer](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Kylo_Ren%27s_TIE_silencer)   
>  [Naboo](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Naboo)   
>  [Naberrie family](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Naberrie_family)   
>  [Varykino](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Varykino)   
>  [Gungan stew](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Gungan_stew)   
>  [Kijimi](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Kijimi)   
>  [Caf](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Caf)


End file.
